


Halt and Catch Fire

by onethingconstant



Series: Winter Soldier Diaries [2]
Category: Bucky Barnes - Fandom, Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, captain america: the winter soldier - Fandom
Genre: Action, Angst, Artificial Intelligence, Brainwashing, Bucky in emotional pain, Bucky in physical pain, Cats, Coercion, Espionage, F/M, Feels, Gen, Hydra, Invaders (Marvel Comics), Pain, Past Relationships, PoW, Robots, Steve and Bucky are best friends, Steve in emotional pain, lavender - Freeform, questions about humanity, sorry no sex scenes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-30
Updated: 2015-09-17
Packaged: 2018-04-12 01:29:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 47,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4460057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onethingconstant/pseuds/onethingconstant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve and Bucky are back together and working with Sam to burn Hydra to cinders. But when a mission goes pear-shaped and Bucky is left in a questionable mental state, the boys must seek help from unlikely sources: a mysterious woman from their shared past and Hydra's newest secret weapon. The boys from Brooklyn still have a few secrets, even from each other.</p><p>They tell the story in their own words.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Zulu Time

**Author's Note:**

> (Note: Steve and Bucky narrate alternating chapters. See the note at the beginning of each chapter for who's talking. In general, Steve's got odds and Bucky's got evens.)

**STEVE**

_Maybe the future's really not that bad._

That's what I'm thinking as I check my watch and note that it's three a.m. local time, even though I haven't touched the buttons since the plane took off from Washington, D.C., eight hours and six time zones ago. I can also check the plane's altitude, the weather on the ground, and half a dozen other things I don't particularly care about. I remember when watches just told time, and in one time zone at that.

For me, it was about three years ago.

I've learned to be polite about the future. Politeness is important when you're a guest in a stranger's house, and that's what I am, in a lot of ways. At least, I hope I'm still a guest, because otherwise I'm a refugee. God knows I feel like one sometimes, mostly at three in the morning.

Everybody likes to remind me that I saved the world. And I guess I did. I stopped the Red Skull from conquering it, anyway. He died, and I almost died, and I woke up in a future I never thought I'd get to see. It's like living in a pulp magazine. There are computers everywhere, space stations, people in outlandish outfits. There are footprints on the moon and we have jet planes instead of polio, and all of that's such old news that people don't even talk about it anymore. Instead, when they talk to me, they talk about how I saved the world back in 1945. 

"Back" in 1945. Or, as I still call it in the privacy of my mind, last year.

The thing is—and I'll never say this out loud, because my mom raised me to be polite and I am a guest in a stranger's house—I don't want to talk about 1945 to people who weren't there. I don't want to have one more conversation about how amazing the future is and how strange it is that I'm walking around in it, ninety-five years old and looking like I'm fresh off the college football team. I don't want a watch that syncs itself to a GPS satellite. I want someone to invent time travel so I can go home.

At three in the morning, I'm so homesick for 1945—world war and all—that I could scream. But I don't. I am polite. I have to be, because I'm never going home.

Sometimes I hate the future.

But I hate it a little less right now. That's because the future just recently decided to cut me a break. I can't go home, but three days ago, a little piece of home found its way to me.

I could be flying the plane right now; I made a point of getting certified on these little Stark jets a few months back. But Tony Stark's autopilot does a better job than I could, and I want to enjoy the quiet. It's why I'm awake at three a.m. local time, pretending to read a book while the other two occupants of the cabin sleep.

Sam Wilson is sacked out in the back, sprawled across a couch and snoring faintly. I like Sam. He's smart, he's tough, and he's got a dry sense of humor that can find hilarity in anything, up to and including anti-aircraft fire. Sam took me in when almost everyone I knew was trying to kill me, and he watched my back through the worst couple of days I've had since I came out of the ice. I think he had fun doing it, too. One of these nights I'll get Sam to talk about his 1945—the mission where he lost his wingman and, I think, best friend. Right now, though, we're in that strange zone you find in combat where you'd give your life for the guy next to you but you wouldn't show him the picture of your girlfriend in your wallet. I find most soldiers get through that zone in a couple of days or weeks. I know Sam's got things on his mind, and when he finally stops being a VA counselor, I'll be glad to hear them.

But much as I'm grateful for Sam Wilson, he's not why I'm looking more kindly on the future as our plane circles the airport in Zagreb. That's where the other guy on this aircraft comes in.

He's slumped in a chair across the aisle from me, completely dead to the world. It's still weird to look at him because he's got a 1945 face on a 2014 everything else. Twenty-first-century clothes, including a black tactical suit under a leather motorcycle jacket with a white star on its left shoulder. I can see a glint of silver through the gap between the end of his sleeve and the top of the glove covering his left hand. Nobody in 1945 had a bionic left arm, that's for sure. And he's a little taller and a lot more muscular than I remember him being back in the war. But his face is exactly like I remember it—twice-broken nose, full mouth bent at the corners, faint crescent-moon scar tracing the edge of the hollow under his left eye. I remember when that cut was still fresh, still bleeding. So does he, now.

James Buchanan Barnes. Bucky. It still feels like he fell off the moon.

Bucky and I have been each other's best friend and worst influence since we were kids together in Brooklyn. He was a few months older and a full head taller for most of our lives, and the day we met in a schoolyard scrap in kindergarten, he appointed himself my official protector and also the brains of the outfit. Which was as funny then as now, because we were both at the top of our class all through school and neither one of us was bright enough to stay out of a fight. I was never one to let bullies push me around, no matter how much bigger they were, so Bucky would jump in and beat the tar out of whoever was trying to pulp me on any given day. And while nobody who'd met Bucky and his temper would be stupid enough to pick on _him_ —not twice—he couldn't stand to see anybody else get pushed around either. So I'd jump in after him, and we'd usually win as long as nobody thought to dogpile on Bucky.

We spent half of elementary school with black eyes and loved almost every minute of it. I was an only child and Bucky just had three younger sisters, so we pretty much adopted each other as long-lost brothers. We studied together and watched each other's backs in fights. I cheered him on when he won the all-city boxing tournament, and he got me into art by stealing my first set of drawing pencils—though he claimed he'd worked for them and I'll never let on that I knew he was lying. After my mom died, we lived together like real brothers.

The first time we were separated was when Buck enlisted in the Army and I was classified 4F. I kept trying to join up, but by the time I went into Project: Rebirth and got turned into Captain America, he was overseas already and we lost track of each other. We didn't meet up again until I went AWOL to rescue him—okay, him and a hundred-plus of his closest friends—from a Hydra factory-lab where God only knows what had been done to him. I never asked about any of it except the scar.

He said he got it mouthing off to a Nazi. I said that sounded like him. We laughed and left it at that. Following Bucky into trouble felt like the old days, and digging too deeply would spoil the fun.

And it _was_ fun, if you can call a war fun. Bucky was a lot quieter after we escaped, but he was still Bucky, even if he was following me into fights a lot more than I was following him. We busted up Hydra facilities and hunted the Red Skull across Europe. I blew up tanks and Bucky shot Nazis off my back. We fought our way from Italy to eastern Germany, arguing about girls and the Dodgers all the way.

But then an extraction went wrong, and Bucky fell to his death right in front of me, and nothing was fun anymore. I tried to get stinking Irish drunk for the first time in my life, and found out I couldn't even do that properly. I went after Hydra like Buck went after guys who picked on his sisters, and one thing led to another and I died and woke up in the future.

And just when I'd gotten used to being a permanent guest in a stranger's house, Bucky walked back into my life. Okay, he walked back into my life and shot me with a rocket-propelled grenade, but I don't keep score. Not since kindergarten.

If I thought being a POW changed Bucky, it was nothing to what being the Winter Soldier did. He spent seven decades either frozen in a cryo unit or with Hydra in control of his mind. By the time they sent him to kill me, he could look me right in the eye and not know his own name, let alone mine. We nearly killed each other before we found a way to get his memories back.

At least, I think that's what happened. I remember letting Bucky beat the hell out of me, and falling into the Potomac River. Bucky says he pulled me out, and he must have, because nobody else could've done it in time. I just remember waking up in a hospital bed, looking around for Bucky, and only seeing Sam.

About a week later, Bucky showed up in my apartment. He'd cut his hair and changed his clothes and he was a lot more like the Bucky I remembered from 1945. He couldn't tell me everything that had happened—he said he couldn't remember a lot of it—but he was back and that was all that mattered. Even if he'd somehow picked up a robot cat and a nasty burn on the back of his head. Another thing he doesn't talk about.

I don't push him. The future took almost everything and everyone I knew, but it gave me Bucky. I'm not going to press my luck. Right now I'm just glad that neither one of us has to face the future alone.

"Knock it off," he says abruptly.

I blink and realize I've been staring at him for a couple of minutes now. Bucky opens one eye and gives me a dirty look. 

"What?" I say, feigning innocence.

"You got that look again." He yawns, stretches, rubs his face with his right hand. The touch of his glove makes him blink awake. I can almost see the bleary thought process: _Why am I sleeping with gloves on?—Oh, right, my left hand is metal—Oh, right, Hydra._ I think he sometimes forgets what year it is. I know I do.

"What?" I ask again, to distract him. He mopes sometimes when he first wakes up. "What look?"

"Three days I've been following you around, and you're still staring at me like you think I'm gonna disappear when you blink." Bucky rubs his eyes.

"Two days," I say. "Saturday doesn't count."

"Yeah? And whose bright idea was that?"

I smile sheepishly. It was mine, of course. Saturday was when I finished packing up my apartment in D.C. and loaded everything into a U-Haul for the move to Brooklyn. The problem was that I wasn't the only tenant moving out that day. My next-door neighbor, Sharon, was leaving too, and we split the work—she packed my boxes while I was off chasing Bucky all over Europe, and I moved her furniture so neither of us had to hire a moving company. It seemed like a good plan until Bucky reappeared and wanted to help.

Two super-soldiers would have been able to carry twice as much stuff. But Sharon is a former SHIELD agent, like me, and she was first on the scene when the Winter Soldier shot her boss, Nick Fury, through my living-room wall. Bucky wasn't in control of himself that night, and Fury survived, but Sharon doesn't know either of those things. I didn't want to take a chance on her noticing why my mysterious new roommate wore long sleeves and gloves all the time. The last thing anybody needed was Bucky and Sharon having a shootout in the middle of Dupont Circle. So I made him stay away.

I think Bucky saw my point, but I know it bothered him. What good is a friend who doesn't help you move?

"It's going to take some getting used to, that's all," I tell him. "I mean, you were dead for two-and-a-half years, Zulu time."

Another inside joke—"Zulu time" doesn't just mean Greenwich time anymore. It's our personal, subjective sense of time, not counting the time we were frozen. 1945 was a year or two ago, Zulu time, for us. We made it up on the drive to Brooklyn. Even I couldn't stop Bucky from coming along for that.

Bucky stifles another yawn, blinks, and pushes his unruly brown hair out of his face. "Too bad, punk," he says. "You're stuck with me. Adjust."

"Understood, jerk," I reply, and we exchange grins. God, it's good to have him back.

Bucky looks around the cabin. "What time is it?"

"Oh three hundred local," I say. "We should have about twenty minutes before we land. You need a cup of coffee before we get moving?"

"No, I'll be fine by then." He stands up and starts pacing the aisle. Another change—whatever Hydra did to him to turn him into me, they gave him a fast metabolism like mine. Now he's quick, he's strong, he can't get drunk, he heals as quickly as I do, and he can rev himself up by walking the way normal humans use espresso. I can do the same thing, technically, but I got used to drinking coffee with the other GIs. Hydra doesn't believe in java.

Or maybe he's just got a lot of nervous energy.

"Tell me about the base again," I say, closing my book and slipping it into my duffel bag. 

"It started out as a reading room and listening post," he says, turning around at the end of the aisle. "The lab was added later, when they needed to use me in the Balkans. Sarajevo was too hot."

I nod. I wasn't around for any of what he's talking about, but I do a lot of reading. Good thing I like history. Suddenly there's a lot more of it.

I also note the phrase _use me_. He still hasn't settled on a way of talking about the Winter Soldier's work for Hydra.

"So the facility's what, twenty years old?" I ask.

"About. Probably still in use. And it's underground, hooked right into the city's electrical grid. Pretty versatile."

"Underground?" Sam groans from the couch. "No more sewers. Not after Kiev."

I smirk at Bucky as he paces up the aisle. We weren't trying to wake Sam, but he listens for certain words even when he's asleep. 

"The plan's the same," I say over my shoulder to the pararescue sitting up on the couch. "You're still aerial recon."

"Damn right." Sam checks his watch. "Tell me there's coffee."

"In the galley," I say, and turn back to Bucky. "So?"

"Standard operating," Bucky says. "I go in, set the charges. You and Sam make some noise. I get out, we blow the joint. We're back in the air in four hours."

"Not a lot of time for sightseeing."

"I got nothing I want to see. You?"

I shake my head, keeping my eyes on his face. I can't help it. He says he doesn't remember what happened in these Hydra bases—just the locations, the passcodes, and the other nuts and bolts.

And it's like it was with the pencils. I know he's lying and I don't let on. There's something bad in this place. There's a reason he chose to hit Zagreb first. He doesn't want to tell me; that's fine. I trust him to give me the intel I need.

But I wish he'd say something.

Sam comes back from the galley, holding a steaming paper cup with a plastic lid. I can smell the coffee as he drops into a seat behind me.

"Hey, Buck," I say, and when I've got his attention, I jerk my head at the cup of joe.

He shrugs. "Sure," he says. And he stops pacing.

I get up and head for the galley as Bucky sits back down in his seat. Score one for his human side.

"Like you guys need the caffeine," Sam says dryly as I pass him. I smile as I hear Bucky snort with suppressed laughter.

By the time I come back, Sam's halfway through his cup and it's starting to go cold as he's explaining Marvin Gaye to Buck, who's listening attentively. So far we've figured out that Bucky can run intellectual rings around me on anything that makes a good assassin—technology, mostly, and the basics of blending in—but Hydra didn't bother to expose him to popular culture, so I'm way ahead of him on movies, music, and anything I can have a non-1945 conversation about. That's another reversal, and one Buck is determined to undo. He loved music before the war, and never passed up a chance to take a girl dancing. Now he doesn't know any of the songs or steps. He seems to want to fix that. Good for him.

"What's a synthesizer?" he's asking as I hand him a cup.

"Half the time, your worst nightmare," Sam says blandly. "Otherwise, sweet perfection." He goes on about how synths work and how they're used. I watch Bucky out of the corner of my eye as I drink my coffee. He's completely engrossed—so absorbed that he tries to drink out of the wrong part of his cup and gets a mouthful of plastic lid. I look out the window so he doesn't see me smirking. Sam doesn't notice a thing. 

"You know what it's like?" Bucky asks in my earpiece an hour later, as we're waiting for Sam to finish his flyover.

"What's like?" I reply.

"The future. All of it. You know what it's like?"

"Buck Rogers?" I ask. I've thought it, too. 

"Exactly," Bucky says. "Buck Rogers in the Twenty-Fifth Century. You wake up and the whole world's different. And you're the only one who thinks it's strange."

"Except nobody's heard of Buck Rogers now," I point out. I used the analogy to Tony Stark once, and he had to stop and Google it.

"Yeah, why is that? You'd think there would still be comic books or something."

"I don't know. Maybe it's because we've got real spaceships now?"

"Without fins, though." Bucky sounds thoughtful. "It's crazy, but I miss fins."

"I miss payphones," I tell him. "Who wants to carry their own phone everywhere?"

"Exactly!" Bucky laughs.

I grin. He can't see me, so I'm smiling for myself. I'm sitting in an empty office across the street from a downtown metro station in Zagreb, keeping an eye on what Bucky swears is the entrance to an underground Hydra lab. He's up on a nearby rooftop with a rifle, covering Sam as he does his flyover. From a thousand feet up, Sam and some of Tony Stark's radar and infrared equipment are all the surveillance we need.

It's good to hear Bucky laughing, I think. Until the last couple of days, I had no idea how much I missed that sound. I still don't hear it as much as I'd like.

"And another thing—" Bucky begins.

But another voice cuts him off. "How the hell did you two make it through a world war?" Sam crackles in. "You guys have the comm discipline of a couple of kindergarteners."

"Sorry, Sam," I say, but Bucky just chuckles. It's the sound he used to make right before he picked a really good fight, and I'm glad Sam can't see me grinning from ear to ear.

We did have much better comm discipline in the war. But Bucky was usually the one insisting on radio silence then—him and Gabe Jones, our radio operator. Jones spoke four languages and was always trying to listen for chatter; Bucky always had an ear on his surroundings and didn't like unnecessary noise when he was working. Now, though, it's like he's had three cups of coffee. He's wired.

"If you two are done talking about your record collections," Sam says, "we're good to go. There's plenty of activity down there, but if the floor plans are right, it's mostly in the labs, the barracks, and the cafeteria. No sign they're ready for much of anything."

"Got it," I say. "Thanks. Buck?"

Bucky blows a quick breath out through his teeth—not quite a sigh, more like a nervous puff. His mike crackles.

"You in position, Sam?" he asks.

"You double-checking me?"

"I think I am."

"Just get your crazy ass down those stairs before I change my mind." I can hear the grin in Sam's voice, but there's a tightness too.

I tell myself it's only to be expected. This is Sam's first time going into combat with Bucky on the same side. They don't know each other yet, let alone trust. That's all it is.

I hope so, anyway.

"Going," Bucky says. "Steve, move away from the window. Out of sight. Head down."

"What?" This wasn't in the plan. "Why?"

"Just do it. I'll explain later. Please."

"Okay, okay." I step back from the glass, far enough that I can't be seen from the street.

But I don't put my head down. Something in the way Bucky said _please_ has set off a quiet alarm bell in my brain. I'll stay hidden, but I'll take my chances on looking.

About a minute later, I see him walk out of the alley beside the building where he had his nest. He turns right and heads for the metro station. I double-check my position to make sure he can't see me, but he doesn't look up. Not once.

Then he crosses a street, and I see what he wanted to hide.

"Sam?" I murmur into my comm. "You watching him?"

"I got eyes on him," Sam answers. "I'll let you know if anything goes wrong." He sounds distracted; I'm sure he's seen it too.

I might have missed the walk, straight-backed and prowling instead of Bucky's loose-limbed, swinging gait, or the catfooted silent walk he developed for forest patrols. I might have missed the way he's holding his head, chin slightly down to protect his throat like a dog defending his territory. If I hadn't looked closely, I might even have failed to notice the look on his face—or rather, the lack of one.

But as I watch him, Bucky crosses a busy Zagreb street without so much as a sideways glance. No looking both ways or jogging to avoid a collision. He steps calmly out into early-morning traffic and just strides right through. It parts for him like the Red Sea.

I've only ever seen one person ignore speeding cars like that. And it wasn't Bucky Barnes.

I don't say anything to Sam. The comm's open, and I'm not sure who's listening. But Sam must be seeing this too. A cold knot forms in the pit of my stomach.

_He's acting,_ I tell myself. _He's pretending. He wouldn't do this. He can't. Right?_

But I have no way of knowing. And whatever Bucky asked me to look away from, it doesn't look like acting.

It looks like the Winter Soldier.


	2. Whom Do You Serve?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky's mission does not go as planned. At all. Never split the party, Buck ...

**BUCKY**

In the back of my mind, I can hear myself screaming.

It's a short walk from the building where I was holed up to the metro station I returned to after the Zagreb assignment, whenever that was. In theory, I'm just walking. Just another pedestrian, an average guy in a leather jacket heading for his morning train. Just like I was then.

But Hydra didn't survive this long by being stupid. There are cameras all over the area. Body-type scanners and facial-recognition software will have picked me up almost immediately. If there's anyone on duty, watching those feeds, they know the Winter Soldier is on his way. That's why they made me wear the mask all those years—so only _they_ could pick me out of a crowd when I wasn't on a mission. They know I'm coming. That means I have to look as much like the Winter Soldier as I can.

And _that_ means letting the machine drive.

I hate this. My skin is crawling under the tac suit and I can feel the real me hammering on the inside of my skull. There's a reason I keep the last little pieces of the machine—the parts even Tony Stark's amperage couldn't burn out of me—locked away. The machine is a monster. It's everything I never want to be again. But if I'm going to walk into a Hydra base, I have to be a monster. Nothing less will fool anybody. So three minutes ago I closed my eyes, lowered my head, and popped the lock on the door in my brain.

At least Steve can't see this. At least only one of us is screaming.

I feel like a passenger in my own body. I watch myself cross the street—what is it with the machine and playing in traffic?—and stalk through the sidewalk crowd like a blank-eyed ghost. I turn into the metro station and I don't even think of jogging down the stairs. I walk, one precise step at a time, like a robot. I melt into the crowd, letting the front of my mind stay empty like it always was when I had completed a mission. The back is screaming like crazy, but it doesn't show on my face. Machines don't think. I've got humans to think for me.

Nobody looks my way or notices me. I don't make eye contact or avoid it. I'm walking and breathing, but as far as the metro crowd is concerned, I'm not really there at all.

So nobody notices when I turn off the corridor and step through a side door. They won't remember me tapping a code into a keypad. They won't see me vanish.

There's a second door behind the first. It has no doorknob. Instead, there's a retinal scanner. On autopilot, I step up to it and look at the light. It flashes. I don't blink.

After a moment, the door opens. There's a man there aiming an energy rifle at my face. My expression doesn't change.

" _Zeemneey Soldat_ ," I say. _Winter Soldier_ in Russian. And I say a code phrase, and I just stand there. I wait for instructions.

The part of me that's watching the guard's face—the part that's not in charge—sees him start to worry. He won't have been told to expect me today. But is that because I'm not supposed to be here, or because he's not supposed to know about me? He'll have heard the rumors; after fifty years, everybody in Hydra has. He never expected me to just show up. But that code phrase means that we've both got orders, and his are to do anything I ask in order to fulfill mine. If he gets in my way, I might just kill him. I might do that anyhow. I can see him thinking that. I can see him getting scared.

But he's not going to be bullied. And he's curious, too. He's heard the rumors.

Without lowering the rifle, he says, in Russian, "Take the jacket off."

I unzip my jacket, slip it off, and let it dangle from my right hand. The part of me that's not driving watches him stare in horrified fascination at the servos and steel plates where my left arm used to be. The red star on my shoulder glints in the fluorescent lighting.

A bionic limb is great identification.

The guard is convinced. He lowers the rifle and tells me I can put the jacket back on. I obey. Technically I outrank him; in the strange hierarchy of Hydra, I speak with my controller's voice and I can order just about anybody around. But the machine is programmed to be relatively docile inside Hydra facilities, around Hydra personnel. If I don't have a designated commander and somebody's instructions don't conflict with my programming, I do as I'm told. And if there's a problem, I ignore the conflicting order and obey the machine. Simple.

The guard doesn't know that, though. The rumors don't mention the brainwashing. He thinks I'm like this because I want to be. In some ways, that's even creepier than the truth. Who would _want_ to be the Winter Soldier?

Okay, I would, just for an hour or so. But that's different. I think. I hope.

The guard puts up his rifle and steps aside just a bit too quickly. He's scared. Good. I stalk past him like he's already disappeared from my memory. As I head down the corridor into the base, I hear him getting on his radio, telling his superiors I'm here. Nobody has the guts to insist on an escort, so I've got a little unsupervised time now, but it's not a lot. Ten minutes, tops, and someone high up the chain will come to ask what I want. I need to be done by then.

I remember the layout from the last time I was here. I find the communications hub first and waste two minutes pretending to send an encrypted message. It's a plausible excuse for my presence, and the comm officer on duty stays so far out of my way that he might as well be in another time zone. He's so busy watching my left hand work the radio that he doesn't see me slip a button-sized pellet of white putty out of my right sleeve and press it to the underside of his desk. A little buzz against my fingertip tells me the miniature detonator is armed.

God bless Tony Stark and his toys. He might not be in the weapons business anymore, but he's got some wonderful things sitting around in storage. There won't be any calling for backup once the fireworks start.

I make my way through the base, finding an excuse to loiter in nearly every room and tuck an explosive pellet under a table or inside a cabinet. The barracks get half a dozen. The cafeteria gets four. There are four labs, and each one gets a handful of little bombs. I want them to burn more than anything else. I remember what happened in there.

The last lab I visit is the oldest one, the one where they kept me between missions over what I think was about a year. The cryo chamber still stands in the corner. I can feel the frost forming on my skin just looking at it.

This is the strangest, hardest part of the plan. I'm still letting the machine drive, and it's very much at home in cryo. But the part of me that's watching from the back of my mind hates it. Just the sight of the steel door with its little window, and I remember the sight of my iced-over face reflected in the glass whenever my eyes froze open, and half of me is pounding on the inside of my skull and screaming to be let out so it can destroy everything in sight. And that half is not in charge.

This is how I spent my Saturday, while Steve was carrying couches one-handed and flirting with a cute blonde that I vaguely recall seeing in pink hospital scrubs one night. I felt pretty crappy about leaving him with all the heavy lifting, so I took the day to work on the plan for Zagreb and figure out how I'd get inside the base. That's when I found out just how much of the machine was left in my head.

Maybe something got missed when I let Tony Stark electrocute me to burn out the implant in my brain. Maybe some of the programming didn't come from the implant after all. Maybe—and this is what keeps me awake at night—it was never dead at all, and now it's growing back. Maybe a part of me will be Hydra's tool forever. It's a real possibility.

The last time I thought that, I panicked and ran away. I ended up nearly dying a couple of times as a result, and while I know I'd rather be a corpse than the fist of Hydra, neither one of those options is my first choice. If I die, I let them get away with too much crap, and I leave Steve all alone. I'm not sure which of those outcomes I like less. So I can't run. Steve would only chase me anyway.

Besides, I've always known that once you run from a bully, he'll never let you stop. The machine is the biggest, meanest schoolyard bully I've ever met. I had to fight it.

So I sat down on a rooftop and started building a box in my head, just like the one the machine kept me in all those years. I added locks and bolts. I reinforced the hinges and the corners. I bound it with iron. I stuffed the machine down inside it.

And then I opened the box and let it out.

I practiced for hours, letting the machine take me over and fighting my way back out of it. It hurt. By the time I was sure I could turn the machine on and off, I'd given myself a concussion twice over by slamming my head into the rooftop to break the machine. Cognitive recalibration, I heard Steve call it. Take a victim of mind control, hit him really hard in the head, and see what shakes loose. It usually works, though everybody's a little sorry later.

I learned two important lessons on that rooftop. First, the machine is just as awful as I remember it. The flashbacks are vivid; the compulsions are hideous; I'm screaming all the time and nobody can hear me. Second, the longer I let the machine drive, the harder it is to come back. It's like the machine has to be in the box or else I do, and whenever I'm on the inside, it tries to add more locks.

On Saturday, my record was ten minutes before I chickened out. That's how long I could stand to have the machine free before I started to lose my sense of self and I ended up headbutting roof tiles.

By the time I'm standing in front of the cryo unit, I'm at twelve minutes and counting.

" _Zeemneey Soldat_."

I turn slowly. _Poker face_ , the back of my mind whispers. _Poker face. Whatever you do, don't let on ..._

But I don't need the help. The machine doesn't change expression easily.

There's a little group of men standing behind me, blocking the exit. Lab-smocked scientists and burly Hydra foot soldiers in the back, a few higher-ups in front. The rank insignia on their jumpsuits tell me I'm looking at most of the base's high command. Front and center is a tall, thin-faced man who reminds me of Basil Rathbone. He's got the red enameled Hydra head on his collar that marks him as a political officer, and a high-ranking one, and a silver head for science. A double threat. Terrific.

Basil Rathbone is gazing directly at me. The back of my mind fidgets and looks around for escape routes. The front is perfectly at ease. 

"What is your assignment, Winter Soldier?" Basil Rathbone asks me in Russian.

I don't answer. As far as the machine knows, I don't _have_ an assignment. If I did, it would be killing Steve, and he's not here.

One of the lesser officers behind Rathbone makes a quick hand signal to the agents behind him, and the foot soldiers fan out.

"Whom do you serve?" Rathbone asks.

That's when I start to sweat. Even though the machine has an answer. It was a question I was asked every couple of awakenings: _Whom do you serve?_ There's only one possible reply.

"I serve Hydra," the machine says in my voice. In Russian, naturally. I don't think I could make myself say those words in English, not now.

But the question itself is very bad news. The only people who asked me _Whom do you serve?_ were the ones who knew I was serving at all, and that it wasn't by choice. My handlers asked that, and my programmers, and once or twice Alexander Pierce, apparently just to remind himself and me that I was still under control. Pierce knew more about how I worked than anyone who wasn't sticking electrodes into my brain. I think that's why he was a little afraid of me, sometimes. 

Nobody in godforsaken Zagreb should know to ask me this question. I haven't been here in two decades, and Basil Rathbone isn't old enough to have been command staff here back then. He should have no reason to ask the question.

"Whom do you serve?" Rathbone repeats.

"I serve Hydra," the machine replies. 

Faces begin to change behind Rathbone. Scowls and worried frowns appear.

"This is your last chance," Rathbone says calmly. " _Whom_ do you _serve?_ "

Now the machine is annoyed. "I. Serve. Hydra."

Rathbone tilts his head to one side. "I think it's broken," he remarks to the man on his right. "Pity." He raises his voice to address the men behind him. "Take it. Try not to damage it permanently."

The soldiers charge. They won't shoot—not in a lab full of sensitive and expensive equipment—but I'll have to watch out for blades and blows. There are enough of them to dogpile—

The memory flickers in before I can stop it. I'm ten years old, tops, and I'm at the bottom of a squirming, kicking heap of other boys. There's a knee in my gut and a butt pressed up against my face. I twist and bite. Somebody yells. I drive an elbow into someone's ribs, I scratch and I bite and I kick, but the pile is getting heavier and I hear Steve yelling my name. Suddenly there's a shift in the press of bodies, and a rail-thin arm snakes in through a narrow gap above my left hand. I grab hold, and we both start to pull, and I start laughing like a lunatic because now I'm having fun again—

I blink the memory away, feeling the stab of pain the machine uses to punish me for thinking about my past. Time was, I could get out of anything as long as Steve was there to save my ass or light my fuse at the right moment. But Steve's not here right now. Even I'm not here, not completely.

But that doesn't mean I can't have fun.

I grab the first soldier and throw him at the attacking right flank, just because I can. My aim is good, and four guys go down in a tangle of limbs. The next two unlucky goons get punched and batted aside with my left arm as the right slips a combat knife out of a sheath on my lower back. Goons three and four go down with a couple of surgical strokes—a nasty zipper incision up the torso and a quick dodge-and-slice to a hamstring. They're not fast enough to avoid me or well-armored enough to survive me.

While the front of my mind is busy finding nerve clusters and exposed blood vessels, the back is thinking about Steve. What would he say if he could see me down here, using the machine—letting the machine use me—to kill these men? And I _am_ killing some of them, no question about that. Arterial blood spurts. Skulls crack. There's a survivable way to get punched in the throat, but it's not happening here. I'm fighting as the Winter Soldier, not as Bucky Barnes.

And I don't feel anything. I came down here to kill, but that was impersonal—explosives are all about distance. This is up close, hand-to-hand, and I might as well be swatting mosquitos. I'm not having fun like I expected. I'm barely even here.

The machine's enjoying itself, though. I can feel that. This is the first real workout it's had in days, and it sings to itself as bones and teeth break under my fists. All the while, I can feel myself drifting away, getting smaller and fainter, becoming lost in the orgy of violence.

I think Steve would be appalled, but somehow I don't care anymore. I've been under the machine for thirteen minutes, and I'm becoming who I was meant to be. Who I was _made_ to be.

I feel it happening, but it's way too late to stop it. I'm the Winter Soldier again, and now I'm off my leash.

Then somebody hits me in the head with a chair.

I stagger, momentarily stunned, and for half a second I don't know where I am. Then somebody else kicks me in the gut, and I fall backward, crashing into a lab bench and whacking my head against a shelving unit. Glass shatters, and something pours into my hair, dribbling down my face and spattering my tac suit with something clear but foul-smelling. Disoriented, I try to shake myself dry, but my legs are kicked out from under me before I can do more than shiver. I hit the floor hard, knees and then face, and then I'm being kicked and punched from all sides. The room spins. I can't tell up from down and when I try to curl into a ball, I just get hit harder. The press of bodies closes in, blotting out the light, and this time there's no skinny arm to pull me out. Not that I can remember where I've seen that arm before. At the end, I just lie still and take it. Voices in my head scream at me to get up, but they might as well be speaking Chinese.

Finally the blows stop. Hands hook me under my arms and haul me upright, although I can't hold my head up and my chin bangs against my chest. Fingers grab a fistful of my wet hair— _why is it wet, and what's that smell?_ —and jerk me to full attention. Or as close as I can get. I'm still trying to figure out how gravity works.

" _Zeemneey Soldat_ ," says a narrow, hawkish face a couple of inches from mine. "Whom do you serve?"

No answers now. I lurch forward and snap drunkenly at my captor's nose. My teeth click together an inch shy of his skin.

The answering slap makes me bite something inside my mouth. I taste blood.

"Broken," says the hawkish face. "But we can fix that. Did someone wind you up, or did you blunder in here on your own?"

I don't care about this conversation anymore. I sag against the grips on my arms and hair. Blood and saliva dribble from the corner of my mouth.

"I suppose it doesn't matter now," says the man holding my head up. He gives me a sharp shake. "You were a fool to come here, Winter Soldier. Your masters left us the tools to make you our own. You will serve the Red Hydra."

The grip on my hair disappears, and my head hits my chest. I get a hazy glimpse of the front of my tac suit. Where did all that blood come from?

"Put him in the chamber," says the voice of the hawkish face. "He'll be more pliable after a few days on ice, and by then we'll have the chair ready for him. He can test the new program before Prometheus arrives."

Suddenly I'm being dragged backward. I try to struggle, but my limbs aren't responding.

_Cognitive recalibration_ , a remembered voice says in my ear. _It works wonders._

Then nobody's touching me anymore, and I'm falling backward. My back hits cold metal, and I collapse onto a steel grating. A door slams; now I'm in the dark. Somewhere nearby, something starts to hum. I begin shivering violently. Why do I suddenly feel so cold?

A memory flickers feebly through my bruised brain: frost forming on glass, a face staring back at me from the ice. The voices in my head are screaming now, but I can't understand them. It's too cold to think.

I feel like I ought to stand up for this, but nothing works right. Oh, well. Can't be important, can it? And anyway a nap sounds pretty good right now ... too bad it's so cold, but I'm really tired all of a sudden ...

I think I sleep, but not for very long. The thunder wakes me. The distant rumbles come first, but they're moving closer. Boom. The floor grate trembles. Boom. The walls shake. Boom. My bones vibrate.

Boom.

I open my eyes.

I'm still cold and exhausted, but the thunder won't let me sleep. I sit up, shake my head. It won't clear. Whatever just happened, it rang my bell pretty good. But the booms are coming from outside my skull, and the little bit of my brain that still works is nagging me about something. Booms are important.

Boom. The cryo chamber rocks.

Cryo. I'm in cryo. And I'm awake, so I haven't been in here long. What's making that noise?

Boom. Baboom. Two blasts close together.

A fragment of memory: a large hand holding a few dozen white pellets.

_They'll stick to anything_ , a voice says. _Press hard to set the timers. You'll have thirty minutes. They'll buzz when you've set them right. Just get out of there in time._

Boom-boom-boom. In the distance, alarms are blaring.

_Thirty minutes,_ the remembered voice repeats. _Just get out of there in time._

_It's all on you, Buck._

I sit up straighter, groggily. I don't know who owns that voice, but it pushes even harder on my mind than the machine does. I can't disappoint it.

With a groan, I heave myself to my feet. Ice crackles. Something's frozen all over my tac suit, and my hair feels like it's frozen solid. Worry about it later. I lean heavily on the door of the cryo chamber, resting my right hand beside the little window to steady myself.

I draw back my left arm. Frost crackles off my jacket sleeve. Servos whine about the cold. I ignore them. I cock my arm back to shoulder height, brace my feet like somebody—who?—taught me to do, and release.

The force travels from feet to hips to shoulder to fist, and my arm goes off like a piston firing. My aim is perfect. My metal fist punches straight through the glass.

Hot air blasts my face. It's better than coffee.

The explosions are getting closer. I draw back and punch again. Boom. There's a hole in the steel door. Another blow. Boom. The hole's bigger. Boom. Now the lock is gone, and the door groans open, and I stumble out into light.

I'm still freezing, and I have no idea where I am, but I'm free. It's somewhere to start. The alarms are still wailing, and through the open door of the room—lab?—where I find myself, I see people running past. A lot of them are wearing lab coats or black jumpsuits. 

_If you see me running, catch up._

I blink. I'm seeing two places at once—the sterile white lab and a grimy brick alleyway. In the alley is a scrawny blond kid. He's got one eyebrow up like he can't believe what I just said.

_What?_ he asks. _Why?_

_'Cause somebody's gonna be chasing me, dummy,_ I say. _And they'll catch you if they can._

_What'd you do now, Buck?_

_Not now. Just promise you'll keep up._

_Okay, okay. Jeez. But you're faster'n I am._

_I'll pull ya. Now c'mon._ I turn away and walk toward the mouth of the alley.

_Where are we going?_ the blond kid asks.

_Somewhere far from the science room_ , I say. _And farther from Freddy Reilly's locker._

And then I'm back in the lab, with the screaming alarms and the running people. I might as well take my own advice. I lurch for the door and stumble out into the hallway crowd. I'm still shivering from the cryo chamber, though, and I ache all over, so it's hard to keep up with them. I drip meltwater on the concrete floor as I stagger along.

Boomboomboomboom. Four blasts, almost on top of one another. A woman next to me shrieks and bolts ahead into the mob.

I start to laugh. I don't know why, but something about his situation makes me think of stinkbombs in lockers and it's the funniest thing imaginable. I laugh and laugh.

People start looking sideways at me, and a little clearing forms around me as everyone within arm's reach tries to move away from the laughing, dripping maniac with the metal arm and the bruised face. And that's even funnier. Pretty soon we're all running for the exits. The corridor fills with smoke, orange firelight glows from doorways, and people begin to scream. I'm coughing up ash, but I can't stop grinning.

The door of the base is wide open, and I join the flood of people streaming out into a metro station. There don't seem to be any civilians around, which is weird, but I'm too busy shoving my way to the stairs that lead up to the street. Even though I'm limping and wheezing and dripping something that really stinks—or maybe _because_ of all that—people get out of my way in a hurry.

And then I see why.

The stairs are blocked. A steel security gate has been rolled across the bottom of the staircase. I can see the morning sky above the top of the steps, through the bars, but I might as well be looking at another planet.

Still, I can fix this. I grip a bar with my left hand, brace with my right, and get ready to pull.

Then someone punches me in the lower back.

I don't care who you are, kidney punches _hurt_. I'm already banged up for some reason, and that blow went right through my tac armor. I turn around, planning to deck whoever's stopping me from leaving.

The face is vaguely familiar. It's one of the big, burly guys I saw standing behind a hawkfaced man a while ago. I kind of remember him holding a chair. My head throbs.

"You!" the burly man snarls. "You did this! You betrayed Hydra!" He takes a swing at me.

I try to duck, but I'm still half-frozen and I can't breathe properly and I feel like I've been run over by a deuce-and-a-half. I don't duck fast enough. Boom.

The first punch knocks me down. Embarrassing. After that it's a blur. I'm slammed up against the gate, blows raining down from all sides. Every time I try to stand up, I'm kicked down again. Shouts go up around me. This is starting to sound—and feel—like a riot. 

_I'm going to die_ , I think. First clear thought I've had in a while. And then I hear the new sounds.

_Clang. Clunk. Thunk. Bonggg_. Closer and closer. The noise makes me think of trash-can lids. Somebody's banging a trash-can lid around.

Abruptly, the blows stop with one final _clank._

I pry an eye open. There's a hulking blond man in jeans and a white T-shirt kneeling next to me. He's holding a round metal shield, strapped to one forearm, between us and the mob. He's got his eyes fixed on the crowd, but his free hand is reaching back to touch me lightly on the shoulder.

"You okay, Buck?" he asks.

I nod reflexively, then realize he can't see me, so I grunt in what I hope is the affirmative and start to push myself up off the floor. Behind me, though, there's a grinding noise and I feel the gate start to rise. Before I know what's happened, the hand on my shoulder pushes me back down and shoves me under the rising bars. I roll into the bottom step and stop there, but I get a good view of the big blond guy as he drops to the ground and slides out after me, shield and all, just before the gate slams back down. Arms stretch through the bars, reaching for him, but he's out of range in half a second.

"C'mon," he grunts, standing up and grabbing me by my right arm. He pulls me upright and holds me there until I get my feet under me. Then he's hauling me up the stairs, double-time. "The police are on their way," he says to me over his shoulder. "We've gotta move."

I open my mouth to agree, and I'm trying to remember his name—I really ought to know it—when two things happen at the same time.

The first is that my whole field of vision turns red. The second is that I burst into flames.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For anyone interested, "deuce-and-a-half" is Army slang for a big (2.5-ton) truck. I have never been hit or run over by one, but I *have* been run over by a Toyota Corolla, and I extrapolated from there. Bucky's a supersoldier, after all.
> 
> If you don't know who Basil Rathbone is, Google Image Search is your friend. He isn't the last old-time movie star who'll be mentioned in this story, btw.
> 
> Come be my friend on Tumblr! I am onethingconstant there. Every friend I make there is a blow to fascism (yes, really).


	3. He Ain't Heavy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Steve and Bucky get into a fight, Sam's pants get set on fire, and somebody is too tall to be the Queen of England.

**STEVE**

I wait until Bucky's underground and out of our transmission range before I let myself explode.

"Sam, what the hell was that?"

"So you _were_ watching," Sam remarks in my earpiece.

"Of course I was! Did you know he was going to do that?"

"Absolutely. He confides in me all the time because I'm his best friend." The sarcasm could etch glass.

I'm not in a mood to kid around anymore. "I'm serious, Sam. This wasn't the plan. Did we just lose Bucky all over again?"

"You're the expert. I've never met a version of him that looked both ways."

"Damn it." I lean on the windowsill, gripping it so hard that the frame creaks under my fingers.

I feel like an idiot. How could I just let him walk in there like that? I wouldn't have sent him up against Pierce or Zola by himself; I'd have known better than to make him face that alone. I knew he'd been in Zagreb for a while. Why did I assume this place would be less disturbing for him?

_Because he said he was okay_ , I think. _And Bucky's done a lot of questionable things, but he's never lied to me. Not about anything important. ___

__"Maybe he was faking it," Sam says, but he sounds doubtful._ _

__"You don't believe that."_ _

__"I really don't." Sam's sigh makes the line crackle with static. "So what are we gonna do? Go in after him?"_ _

__I grind my teeth, just a little. It was different in the war. Back then I had an entire squad of commandos to worry about, and I had to make my decisions based on what was best for the team. If Bucky went haring off on his own to do something stupid or dangerous, I had to let him run as long as chasing him would compromise unit effectiveness._ _

__But Bucky didn't do this kind of thing back then. If he threw himself into danger, it was because I'd jumped in first. I never had to chase him when he was chasing me._ _

__And now I'm in a unit of three. Bucky's a third of our combat strength, and nearly all our intelligence-gathering ability. If I lose Bucky, the mission's over. Besides, I'm not sure I could survive losing him a second time. I didn't realize how much I missed having a best friend until I suddenly had him back. Just thinking about having to mourn him again is more than I can take right now._ _

__I want to go after him. I want to save him from whatever is eating him alive. I want to tear the roof off that Hydra base and find whatever hurt my friend and smash it to bits._ _

__But._ _

___Did you believe in your friend? Did you respect him?__ _

__Peggy asked me that after Bucky died. It's not everyone who'll walk into a bombed-out pub in the middle of an air raid to talk a grieving super-soldier off a bender. She was always so good with people. Better than I ever was._ _

__I don't remember whether I answered her out loud. I think I just nodded so she wouldn't hear the crack in my voice. Captain America is not supposed to be a weepy drunk. Not actually _being _drunk made it worse.___ _

_____Then allow Barnes the dignity of his choice. He damn well must have thought you were worth it.__ _ _ _

____She was right, of course. I would have given my life for Bucky, and he for me. It was just that we could never agree on which of us would get to do it._ _ _ _

____From Peggy's angle, Bucky's choice makes sense. The Winter Soldier can go places Bucky can't. The weird package of thoughts and behaviors and programming he calls "the machine" is his ticket into that base. It's right for the mission, and it's his mission even more than it's mine. It's a horrible risk, but it's one he's chosen to take. I should back his play. I do believe in Bucky Barnes._ _ _ _

____But I don't trust Hydra._ _ _ _

____I swallow hard. "No, hold off," I tell Sam. "Stick to the plan for now. Let's hope he can pull it off."_ _ _ _

____"Whatever you say, Cap. I guess it's too late to stop him anyway, right?"_ _ _ _

____I wince, glad that Sam can't see me. I did not need to hear that right now._ _ _ _

____The next thirty minutes are the longest of my life. There's a timer on my watch, remorselessly ticking off seconds. I go back and forth between willing it to speed up so the agony is over and silently begging it to slow down so Bucky has time to finish the job and get out. At nineteen minutes, I leave the office and head for the metro station. I am invisibly fighting my watch the whole way._ _ _ _

____Of the three of us, I am probably the worst at stealth ops. I am, in Bucky's words, about as subtle as a George M. Cohan song. I'm six and a half feet tall, built like a linebacker, and prone to saying things that make Sam check my pockets for evidence of a prepared speech. Even with my shield hidden inside a big black artist's portfolio, I'm going to get noticed. I'm going to get seen._ _ _ _

____But not as quickly as a black man in downtown Zagreb will get seen. Croatia isn't exactly known for its range of skin tones. So if anyone's going to loiter in a Zagreb metro station without getting arrested, it's going to be me._ _ _ _

____And I do loiter for several minutes longer than I need to. I read the system map and the train schedule. I sit on a bench and pretend to wait for a train. I pull out my phone and pretend to talk into it in German, which amuses the hell out of Sam._ _ _ _

____After ten minutes, though, Bucky hasn't reappeared, and I have a choice of my own to make. I decide to keep my promise, and pull the fire alarm._ _ _ _

____Nobody suspects the beefy German artist in the white T-shirt of pulling a teenage prank, so I don't get so much as a second glance as the would-be metro riders troop out of the station to seek other forms of transport. And nobody notices me standing in the shadows near an electrical closet._ _ _ _

____At thirty minutes exactly, Sam taps his microphone. "Steve? You reading me?"_ _ _ _

____"Loud and clear," I answer. "Drop the gate."_ _ _ _

____"I can't help noticing you're still inside it."_ _ _ _

____"I'm gonna keep an eye out."_ _ _ _

____"You remember how that station's about to fill up with freaked-out Hydra agents, right? I'm calling the cops now."_ _ _ _

____"I'll be fine, Sam."_ _ _ _

____Sam grunts in frustration. "You really wanna lock yourself in with that many bad guys?"_ _ _ _

____"I really do." I pull my shield out of the portfolio. "And they're not all bad guys."_ _ _ _

____"You don't know that."_ _ _ _

____"Have a little faith. And drop the gate." I slip my arm through the straps. Just like the good old days._ _ _ _

____A minute after the gate slams down, I feel the first explosion shake the floor. I let out the breath I've been holding. Bucky planted some bombs, at least. He started out in control of himself and on task._ _ _ _

____He was alive thirty minutes ago. So far, so good._ _ _ _

____The secret door opens and people start streaming out to evacuate: scientists, techs, clerks, soldiers. It takes all kinds to make a Hydra base. I stay in the deepest shadow I can find, grip my shield, and watch for brown hair or a white star. I believe in Bucky Barnes._ _ _ _

____The first wave of escapees reaches the gate, turns around, and meets the second wave on its way out. Chaos ensues. More Hydra agents come running out as more blasts rock the underground chamber I've converted into a holding cell. I find myself counting explosions as the crowd thickens. Bucky made it long enough to set eight bombs ... eleven ..._ _ _ _

____I'm at sixteen blasts when the white star on Bucky's jacket flashes past in the crowd, and I almost yell his name, I'm so relieved. He's limping, dripping wet, and showing bruises on the side of his face that's toward me, but it's him and he's alive and moving under his own power. He's dropped the Winter Soldier act, too—he's grinning like he's having the time of his life. Good enough for me. Now I just have to get us both out of here before we're arrested along with the rest of Hydra._ _ _ _

____The crowd sweeps Bucky away before I can follow, and in a moment I see him standing at the gate and reaching for it with his bionic hand. He doesn't get a chance to break out, though; a Hydra soldier shouts something, and in a heartbeat he's knocked Bucky down and is kicking him, yelling in Russian as he does so. More Hydra agents join in. I can't even see Buck anymore._ _ _ _

____Hell, no. I'm not losing him again._ _ _ _

____I plunge into the crowd, punching and slamming people with my shield. I don't care who I hurt; they're all Hydra, and they're between me and my friend. I toss agents like ragdolls, moving so fast that I'm gone before they can get a good look. Once the path is clear, I dive in between Bucky and his assailants, letting the shield absorb their blows._ _ _ _

____Bucky's lying against the gate, and he doesn't move until I touch him gently to tell him it's me. He tries to push himself up, but he seems dazed, disoriented. Up close, I notice a detail I missed before: his lips are blue, and his jacket is chilly to the touch. Where has he been—inside a freezer?_ _ _ _

____"You okay, Buck?" I ask him. I know he's not all right, but I want to hear him say something._ _ _ _

____He doesn't say a word. He just tries to push off the floor as the gate starts grinding upward. Sam must have seen us._ _ _ _

____There's no time to be gentle. I shove Bucky back down, cup a hand under his shoulder, and roll him sideways like a log under the gate. He tumbles all the way to the foot of the stairs as I drop low and slip out after him. The gate slams down right behind me. Sam's good._ _ _ _

____"C'mon," I tell Bucky, pulling him to his feet and hustling him up the steps. I try not to notice how slowly he's moving or how cold he feels as I'm filling the air with pointless chatter about the police. I've just got to keep us both moving. I tell myself it's like when I found him in that factory at Krausberg. Get him on his feet, keep him walking, don't get shot or burned, and everything will be okay._ _ _ _

____Then I smell the smoke._ _ _ _

____At first, I think the smoke from the fires in the base must be heading for the surface, but it doesn't smell like it's coming from underground. It's closer than that. I turn my head, following the scent as we reach the top of the stairs, and I see Bucky's head and shoulders smoking. I've still got my hand under his right arm, and I can feel that he's ice-cold, but smoke and steam begin pouring off him as we stagger out onto the sidewalk._ _ _ _

____"Bucky?" I ask, not sure what I'm seeing._ _ _ _

____He turns to look me in the eyes, the first time he's done that since we left the airport. And I see him change._ _ _ _

____Bucky's got hazel eyes—kind of blue, kind of green, kind of brown, kind of nothing. I noticed it when we were kids and I had to paint a portrait for an art class. Bucky was the only person I could get to sit still long enough, and I must have spent twenty minutes trying to get that color right. His eyes shift according to what he's wearing, the weather, his mood. I always thought it was neat; Bucky just complained that all the girls wanted a blue-eyed guy. I think he was trying to make me feel better._ _ _ _

____The Winter Soldier's eyes were hazel, too, of course, but I remember them being lighter somehow. Maybe it was just the light—or the fact that he was trying to choke me to death when I first got a look at them—but they didn't seem to have the same depth of color. I wonder sometimes if I would have recognized him, mask or no mask, if he'd had the same eyes, or whether I'm imagining it in hindsight._ _ _ _

____Now I get my answer. Bucky's irises go a little pale, and his face twists into an expression I haven't seen since the helicarrier. That's when I know what's coming._ _ _ _

____"Bucky, _no_ ," I say, and that's all I have time for before he slips his left hand behind his back and pulls out a knife. He's always got a knife. I don't want to let go of him, but I know where that knife is going, so I shove him off me as he takes a wild slash at my stomach. The point scores through my T-shirt and leaves a diagonal red line across my abdomen. It starts bleeding immediately, but I can tell it's shallow. Bucky tosses the knife to his right hand and comes in for another pass. _ _ _ _

____The flames appear then, roaring up off his head, chest and shoulders like someone drenched him in gasoline and tossed a match. Bucky doesn't seem to notice, even though I can smell burning flesh and hair. He's already turning as he steps in on me, twisting inside my guard and evading my clumsy swipe with my shield. I know he's suckering me, but I'm so focused on the blade heading for my neck and the fire heading for my eyes that I slap the knife hand away, chamber a leg to kick him back, and completely miss his left arm following up. The bionic haymaker hits me like a sack of bricks to the side of my head, and I get slammed into the sidewalk._ _ _ _

____God, do I hate fighting the Winter Soldier. He's almost as tough as I am, he's a dirty-fighting homicidal maniac, and he's Bucky. And that was before somebody set him on fire._ _ _ _

____Bucky jumps on top of me, pinning my shield arm down with one of his legs and denying me leverage. I use my other arm to snap-punch him in the face—one more bruise, sorry about that—and then backhand his right wrist as hard as I can. I manage to hit the nerve cluster, and the knife goes flying. I hear it clatter to the pavement somewhere out of reach. Now he can't stab or cut me, at least. Not that he's less of a problem unarmed. I remember what happened last time Bucky had me on the ground and was out of weapons._ _ _ _

____I try to say his name, but I only get as far as "Buh" before he clocks me again with that metal arm. The thing works like a steam piston—never gets tired, never notices pain that I've seen. The flames dance around him like a lethal halo as he punches me over and over—twice, three times—_ _ _ _

____And then Sam hits him from the side, just slams into Bucky like he's sacking a quarterback. I see a blur of Exo-7 Falcon wings, a flash of maneuvering jets, and a glimpse of two faces—Bucky startled, Sam already wincing—and then the weight's off my chest and my peripheral vision is full of two tumbling men, a pair of wings, and a whole lot of fire._ _ _ _

____I roll up to my feet and sprint toward them. Sam's come up on top and he's pinning Bucky down, and the weight of his flying rig's helping, but Bucky's twisting like a snake and he's still, impossibly, wreathed in flame. Sam's going to get burned if he doesn't get a concussion first._ _ _ _

____"Put him out!" I yell as I run toward my two struggling friends. "Put the fire out!"_ _ _ _

____"A little busy right now!" Sam shouts back. He's got one hand on Bucky's throat and a knee on each arm, but the bionic arm doesn't need much leverage and Buck's slowly lifting one side of Sam off even as he tries to wriggle out of the one-handed choke. Sam looks like a bull-rider about to get thrown, and he hasn't even noticed that his jeans are starting to smolder._ _ _ _

____I reach them and hesitate, just for a second. Bucky's gasping as Sam tries to choke him out, and people who can't breathe always look terrified to me. Maybe they always _are_ terrified. For a heartbeat, though, all I can see is a frightened, confused Bucky Barnes._ _ _ _

____"Ow! Shit!" Little flames have appeared on Sam's pants. "Any time, Cap!"_ _ _ _

____Bucky's eyes move to track me as I snap out of my daze. Maybe it's wishful thinking, but I almost convince myself that I see the color flicker back. But by then it's too late. I'm already moving._ _ _ _

____I punch Bucky in the face with my shield._ _ _ _

____It's a solid hit, I can feel it, and he's out cold before I pull the shield back. Sam springs off him and drops to roll around, beating out the flames on his clothing. I start slapping out the fire on Bucky. I strip off his smoldering jacket and use it to smother the flames on his head and face. When I pull it away, I can see his skin has blistered and part of his hair is scorched black. But he's breathing, slow and ragged and knocked-out deep. I'm less sorry I hit him now. Those burns are going to hurt like hell when he wakes up._ _ _ _

____I look over at Sam. "You okay?"_ _ _ _

____"I think so. God bless Levis." He's poking at the black scorch marks on his jeans. "Have to check, but not on the street, you know?"_ _ _ _

____"Can you fly?"_ _ _ _

____Sam looks over his wings with a professional eye. They're scuffed, but they look intact. "I think so. But I wouldn't want to carry you."_ _ _ _

____"Get back to the plane and get it ready to fly. We've got to take off as soon as everyone's on board."_ _ _ _

____Sam shakes his head. "No way. At least one of you two needs a hospital—"_ _ _ _

____"Not here," I tell him. "Hydra will have people watching the emergency rooms, and we can't hide that arm. Besides, we don't know ..." I look back at Bucky's face. I hate to say it. "We don't know who's going to wake up."_ _ _ _

____I believe in Bucky Barnes. But I know my life would be easier if I didn't._ _ _ _

____"Airport's seven miles away," Sam says as he gets to his feet and snaps his wings out to full extension._ _ _ _

____"See you in sixteen minutes," I reply. I crouch down, scoop Bucky up, and sling him over my shoulder in the rescue carry they taught us in the Army. I stand up, feeling the strain of our combined weight in the muscles of my legs. I can feel Bucky breathing, though. And somehow he's still cold. How can someone who was on fire be so cold?_ _ _ _

____"That looks awkward," Sam says. I hear what he's not saying. He's a pararescue, first and foremost, and I'm carrying a wounded man—a man with unknown injuries—like a sack of potatoes. The metal arm dangles down over my shoulder, its armor plates catching on my shirt._ _ _ _

____"He ain't heavy," I reply. I hope people have still heard of Father Flanagan in this century._ _ _ _

____Sam has, anyway. He nods and blasts off, leaving scorched concrete behind. I shift Bucky's weight to a more comfortable position and break into a run. I can cover a mile in a little over two minutes._ _ _ _

____It's got to look strange, me running through the early-morning streets of Zagreb with Bucky slung over my shoulder, both of us covered in blood and burns and ash. But I'm moving too fast to get caught and too fast to see people's expressions. I concentrate on keeping my speed up, maintaining my pace, and not bouncing my passenger around too much. And I stay alert for signs that he's waking up, but he stays unconscious all the way to the airfield. Small mercies._ _ _ _

____I didn't lie to Sam about the weight. Bucky and I are both a lot heavier than we look. But I remember Father Flanagan._ _ _ _

_____He ain't heavy. He's my brother.__ _ _ _

____I don't bother with the airport terminal. I take a long loop around and run right onto the tarmac. The Stark jet is waiting, engines idling and stairs still down. I hustle us both on board and we're wheels up in minutes. I don't know what Sam told the tower to get us clearance, and I don't care._ _ _ _

____Bucky's still out like a light, so I put him down on his back on the couch in the back of the plane. I fiddle with the restraints in the seat cushions, improvising until I get him strapped in. The last thing I need is to be chasing him all over the cabin if we hit turbulence._ _ _ _

____I snap the last belt home and look up to see Sam standing over me. He's got a pistol-sized tranq gun in one hand, the kind I'd use to knock out Thor._ _ _ _

____"How is he?" he asks, nodding down at Buck._ _ _ _

____"Out," I say. "And feel him, he's cold." I guide Sam's hand to a place on Bucky's side where the tac armor is relatively thin and he didn't get burned._ _ _ _

____"Weird," Sam agrees, probing with his fingers. "Feels like he cracked some ribs, too."_ _ _ _

____"He's warming up now, I think," I say. "He was like ice when I first picked him up. They must have done something to him in there. Wish I knew what."_ _ _ _

____"Thermal blanket ought to help. Maybe stick you under it with him. He probably absorbed some heat while you were running."_ _ _ _

____"Do it. The SHIELD docs said I've got a metabolism that burns four times faster than a normal human's. It's gotta be good for something." I sit with my back against the front of the couch, as close to Bucky as I can get. Sam leans over him._ _ _ _

____There's a hiss, and I look back to see Sam pulling the tranq away from Bucky's neck._ _ _ _

____"What was that?" I demand as he heads for the back of the plane._ _ _ _

____"You want him waking up and trying to kill you again at thirty thousand feet? 'Cause I don't."_ _ _ _

____I scowl, but he's got a point._ _ _ _

____Sam comes back with the blanket and drapes it over us. I feel the warmth almost immediately. I don't like being hot, but I'll put up with it for a while if it helps Bucky._ _ _ _

____Sam sits down on the cabin floor across from me and sets down a first-aid kit. "Hands," he orders. I pull my hands out from under the blanket and hold them out. I'm surprised to see they're blistered and cracked._ _ _ _

____"Didn't even notice, did you?" Sam asks as he opens the kit and pulls out salves and gauze. "That's what you get for putting out a fire with your bare skin. Hold still."_ _ _ _

____I comply, though I'm pretty sure I can heal the damage on my own in a day or two._ _ _ _

____"So where are we going?" Sam continues, applying burn salve. "I told the ATC and the autopilot Paris."_ _ _ _

____It stings. I make a face. "Why Paris?"_ _ _ _

____"Always wanted to go there. Figured it couldn't be too hard to find." Sam starts wrapping my left hand. He's sitting stiffly, I notice, and he's changed his jeans. The new ones are tighter over the thighs but looser everywhere else. He must have bandages on underneath. So he did get burned._ _ _ _

____"I'll reset the course," I say. "We're going to England. Private airfield, but I've got to call ahead and make sure they've got facilities for Bucky."_ _ _ _

____Sam raises his eyebrows. "They? Who's they?"_ _ _ _

____"Friend of a friend," I say. "I'll explain when she's said yes. She's a private person, and she likes it that way. But if she says she'll help, she will, and she'll keep him off the radar."_ _ _ _

____"That's a good friend. What if she doesn't say yes?"_ _ _ _

____I look back over my shoulder at Bucky. His face is the only part of him not under the blanket. It's hard to see past the burns and bruises, but he looks younger when he's asleep. More like the freshly minted sergeant who left me at the World's Fair and shipped out to Europe all those years ago. I don't miss the old skinny Steve Rogers much, but occasionally I miss the old Bucky._ _ _ _

____"She will," I say. "For him, she will."_ _ _ _

____I look back at Sam. He's taping down the gauze on my left hand and giving me a puzzled smile._ _ _ _

____"Man," he says. Everything's classified with you guys. There's always some long story. It's like listening to half a conversation."_ _ _ _

____"Sorry," I reply, smiling ruefully. "I'm ninety-five years old, and I used to work for SHIELD. Pretty much everyone I know is a classified asset, or dead, or," I twitch my head back toward the sleeping figure on the couch, "complicated."_ _ _ _

____"Yeah? Which one am I?" Sam moves to my right hand._ _ _ _

____"Complicated," I say quietly. "How're things at the VA?"_ _ _ _

____Sam pauses in what he's doing and gives me a long, measuring look. Then he goes back to squeezing burn ointment out of the tube. "Officially," he says, "I'm on vacation. I've got three years' worth of vacation days stored up that I never expected to use. I'm making the guys in administration real happy right now."_ _ _ _

____"And unofficially?"_ _ _ _

____"I'm a federal employee who just helped to take apart a major intelligence agency, and I did it with stolen DoD property, in collusion with a known fugitive. If there was a Christmas-card list, I'd be off it forever."_ _ _ _

____"That bad?" I'm surprised. The Veterans Administration never seemed like a very political place to work. Then again, SHIELD took me off the VA's hands the day I thawed out, so what do I know?_ _ _ _

____Sam shrugs. "It sounds worse than it is," he says. "Most of the actual people there are on my side. The guys I work with, they're mostly vets or from military families. Teaming up with Captain America to fight Hydra is pretty much the definition of the right thing to do. It's the guys further up the chain who've got to worry about funding, and, well ..."_ _ _ _

____"I made you a liability." I nod. "I'm sorry."_ _ _ _

____"Shut up." Sam points the tube of ointment at my face. " _I_ made me a liability. I'd do it again, too. All you did was put my dumb ass on television."_ _ _ _

____"You really don't regret anything?"_ _ _ _

____"I regret wearing my good jeans to your little barbecue today. How's that?"_ _ _ _

____I chuckle and shake my head._ _ _ _

____"Seriously, Steve." Sam's face softens. "Do the world a favor and quit blaming yourself for everybody else's problems. You've got enough to carry as it is. Me, I'm having a pretty good time. I got my wings back and I got something important to do. I'll be okay."_ _ _ _

____"Thought you were happy as a civilian."_ _ _ _

____Sam laughs softly. "I was bored is what I was. Now I've got all the excitement I can handle and nobody to salute. You've got no reason to feel guilty on my account."_ _ _ _

____I can't help it. I look back at Bucky._ _ _ _

____"Or his," Sam adds sharply. "He makes his own decisions, same as you do."_ _ _ _

____"I should've known better," I say, shaking my head. "I knew he'd picked that place for a reason. I should've realized he'd get hurt. I just ... I thought he could handle it. He said he could. Bucky never lied to me." A rueful smile tugs at my face. "Except about apples, pencils, and stinkbombs."_ _ _ _

____Sam pulls my right hand closer to himself and starts wrapping. "I've been thinking about that," he remarks. "He ever tell you what he was doing, that week he went missing?"_ _ _ _

____"He said he was thinking. Apparently he went to see Tony Stark and Bruce Banner. To be honest, he didn't make a lot of sense."_ _ _ _

____"I expect he wouldn't." Sam keeps his eyes on his work. "He tell you he ran into me?"_ _ _ _

____"What? No!" I tear my eyes off Bucky and blink at Sam._ _ _ _

____"At the hospital. You were still unconscious. He came in looking like ten miles of bad road, used some bullshit fake ID to get into your room. I caught up with him as he was running out."_ _ _ _

____I shake my head in disbelief. "He never told me."_ _ _ _

____"I might be able to explain that. He told me the reason he was running. He said Hydra left something in his head—some kind of program, maybe. It was trying to make him follow his last set of orders and kill you."_ _ _ _

____"My God," I breathe. "At least it failed."_ _ _ _

____"He didn't think so. When I talked to him, he was afraid he couldn't fight it. And Hydra was hot on his tail, so he decided to run for it. Made me promise not to tell you so you wouldn't find him before he was ready. Considering how your last reunion had gone, I saw his point. He was so worried about it that I figured you'd never see him again unless he was damn sure he could be trusted. When he came back, I assumed he'd gotten a handle on it. I guess we were both wrong."_ _ _ _

____I shake my head. "So he was lying to me. Dummy. He probably thought he was protecting me."_ _ _ _

____"More like lying to himself. One thing I learned working at the VA—there ain't a soldier alive who wants to raise his hand and say he's broken. Especially to the guy watching his six."_ _ _ _

____Sam tugs the gauze into place and tapes it down. I watch him do it. He works quickly and effectively, like he's done this before. I wonder how many guys he's taped back together. I wonder who's taped him. But inevitably, I go back to thinking about Bucky._ _ _ _

____"I wish I knew what they did," I mutter. "He won't talk about it, says he doesn't remember. But it can't be worse than what I imagine when I think about how I left him with them."_ _ _ _

____Sam snorts. "Yeah, you were terrible, the way you went off and got frozen and just left him there."_ _ _ _

____"You know what I mean."_ _ _ _

____"I do. And you know there was nothing you could've done. Hydra is insane, and you can't stop what you can't find. If he doesn't want to tell you what happened, it's probably because he thinks it'll hurt you."_ _ _ _

____"More than _not_ knowing?" I don't believe it. _ _ _ _

____"Hell, yeah. Your friend Rumlow, may he rot in hell, told me Hydra doesn't believe in prisoners. Just order, he said—and order only comes from pain."_ _ _ _

____I turn my head to stare at Bucky. I feel nauseated. How much pain would it take to turn him into the thing I fought? I notice the old scar under his eye. Was Hydra trying to break him even then?_ _ _ _

____I almost expect him to wake up and tell me to quit looking at him. But he just snoozes on, deep under a potent mix of concussion, exhaustion, and sedatives. I know he has nightmares. At least he's not having them now. Small mercies._ _ _ _

_____What does it say_ , I think, _that the kindest thing I can do for Bucky is knock him out?__ _ _ _

____"Son of a bitch," I say softly. "He said he was okay."_ _ _ _

____"He might be," Sam replies. "Or he might just think he is. Or he might just not want to disappoint you. Kinda like you don't want to disappoint him."_ _ _ _

____I tilt my head back until it rests on the blanket covering Bucky's shoulder, the metal one. It's exactly as hard as I expect it to be. I've seen him use this arm as a pillow. I wonder if it ever warms up. Right now it feels like it's fresh out of a refrigerator, even through the blanket, even though I feel like I'm sitting in an oven. How does anybody get this cold and live?_ _ _ _

____I know I did it. But it's like part of Bucky stayed in the ice._ _ _ _

____"You're the counselor," I tell Sam. "What do I do?"_ _ _ _

____Sam shrugs. "Same thing he's gotta do for you. There's no treatment protocol for shit as crazy as yours. The only way to handle it is time and support. You've gotta be his friend and he's gotta be yours. If he wants to talk, let him talk. If he doesn't, don't push him too much. And you talk to him. Lean on him a little. Let him know you want him around, and you trust him."_ _ _ _

____"I do want him around, and I do trust him."_ _ _ _

____"Good. That makes it easier, because you are the worst liar I've ever seen."_ _ _ _

____I laugh. Sam grins. It's like sunlight breaking through storm clouds._ _ _ _

____"Now," he says, "I got two questions."_ _ _ _

____"Shoot."_ _ _ _

____"First, what's that number you gotta call? Because you shouldn't be dialing with those hands."_ _ _ _

____I look down at the bandages. The fingers are taped up separately, but it looks like I'm wearing bulky white gloves. My hands are a little too big for cell phones as it is; this will make punching numbers impossible. I sigh, reach under the blanket, and work my pocket notebook out of the back pocket of my jeans. I toss it to Sam._ _ _ _

____"Last page," I say. "Second number."_ _ _ _

____Sam turns there. "Dude, there's four numbers here. I hope this isn't your whole little black book." He looks up at me. "The third one's mine."_ _ _ _

____It's my turn to shrug. "Everybody I still know from SHIELD is disappearing or changing their number. Everybody else is dead or complicated." I smile sadly. "The first one's Peggy's room at the hospital."_ _ _ _

____Sam nods sympathetically. We've talked about Peggy. He pulls out his phone, dials the second number, and passes it over._ _ _ _

____It picks up on the third ring. I talk for a couple of minutes. I'm light on details; I don't know who might be listening in at the other end. But I say we'll need emergency facilities, and a lot of discretion. I mention burns and broken bones. I know it's a big ask, but I'm pretty sure she'll say yes because it's me._ _ _ _

____Just to be certain, though, I add: "It's about Bucky Barnes. I thought you'd want to know."_ _ _ _

____There's a catch in the breath at the other end, followed by four words: "Whatever you need, Steve."_ _ _ _

____I hang up and ask Sam, "What's the second question?"_ _ _ _

____He smirks. "How long does a guy have to be your friend before he gets to punch you? I wanna plan my shot."_ _ _ _

____I need the laugh. We change course, and an hour later we're taxiing into a private airfield near Birmingham, England. As soon as the engines shut off, we let the EMTs onto the plane. They load Bucky onto a gurney and whisk him off the aircraft and into an ambulance. I want to go with him, but I know I can't. I follow Sam off the plane._ _ _ _

____At the foot of the gangway stands a tall, white-haired woman in an impeccably tailored pearl-gray suit. She's almost my age, but her posture is as erect and perfect as ever, and under her delicately wrinkled skin, the lines of her face are as sharp and elegant as I remember them. She is smiling, though that means very little. As I come down the stairs, though, I see a warm light in her sky-blue eyes._ _ _ _

____"She's too tall to be the Queen of England," Sam whispers to me. "Who is she?"_ _ _ _

____I wonder if she's seen the patient in the ambulance now screaming away across the tarmac. She probably has, I decide. And now she's curious about him. That's why she's smiling at me. I've brought her an interesting puzzle._ _ _ _

____If she only knew._ _ _ _

____"Lady Jacqueline," I say as I reach the ground. "Thank you for meeting us. I'd like you to meet my friend, Sam Wilson, late of the U.S. Air Force 58th Pararescue." I take her hand and mime kissing it. Her eyes sparkle with amusement._ _ _ _

____"Ma'am," Sam says politely. He salutes._ _ _ _

____"Sam," I continue, "may I introduce Lady Jacqueline Falsworth Crichton of Falsworth Manor. She's late of a lot of things, but in the interest of fair play, I ought to tell you that one of them was the French Resistance."_ _ _ _

____"Charmed," Lady Jacqueline says. "And I told you before, Steve. To you, I'm still Jackie."_ _ _ _

____"That's the other thing," I tell Sam. "I told you Jackie's a friend of a friend? That's because seventy years ago, she was engaged to Bucky Barnes."_ _ _ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I'll be updating the tags in a couple of days, but the Female Character To Be Named Later is Jackie Falsworth, a.k.a. Spitfire. She wasn't engaged to Bucky in the comics (he was way too young for her and she had a thing for the Human Torch), but he had a little crush on her and this kind of grew out of that. I think you'll like Jackie.
> 
> Be my friend on Tumblr? I'm onethingconstant. Be my pal and ruin a fascist's day.


	4. Lavender

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "To see one in lavender is to see one dead."  
> \---  
> "Say something. Prove you're him."  
> \---  
> "Is there anything I ought to know about you and her before we go out that door, pal?"  
> \---  
> "Sorry. I got nothing to say."  
> \---  
> Bucky has two reunions while tied down, and his most awkward and perilous conversation of the day is (for once) not with Steve.

**BUCKY**

I'm in the dark. I think I'll stay a while.

The dark is a safe place for me. Safe as it gets. Nobody knows I'm there. Nobody shoots at me, or gives me orders, or tries to turn me into something else. That's as good as I can hope for, a lot of the time.

I used to volunteer to take night watch during the war. I liked sitting in the quiet dark, just listening to the woods. It surprised me that I liked forests as much as I did. I'm a city boy at heart, but cities don't get really dark. It was worth all the strange noises and the weird smells and the occasional wolf to sit out there in real, live, blackness. I miss that.

This darkness isn't like that. I know I'm not in the woods, not in the war. I think I'm lost inside my head again. It happened a few times while I was with Hydra—I'd be awake, sort of, the real me, but so deep down in the dark that the world wasn't there. I got a lot of thinking done in that place. I think it's what helped me survive, made sure there was something left for Steve to pull out when he finally found me again. Yeah, I like the dark.

I don't remember everything that happened in Zagreb and I don't want to. I think I hurt people again, people I didn't want to hurt. Steve? Sam? I don't know if I killed anybody, but I know that if I leave the dark, I'll find out. So I stay.

No light. No sound. No touch. No smell. It's nice.

No, wait. I'm wrong about that. There _is_ a smell, a familiar one ...

Just like that, I'm not in the dark anymore. But I'm still okay; this is a memory, not anything to wake up for.

It's 1943, I think. Feels like it. I'm in my uniform, and I'm walking down a grassy slope with my hands—two real hands, so weird—stuffed deep in my pockets. I have to watch my footing; it rained last night, and the grass and mud are both unbelievably slick. It rains a lot in England.

I look up, sniffing the air, and I almost slide down the hill. I barely catch myself.

"What's that smell?" I ask. "It's like flowers."

"There are a lot of flowers, even at this time of year, Sergeant," says the girl walking beside me. She doesn't need to watch where she steps; she learned to walk on these hills. She's pretty, I guess, in the way every girl is pretty to me during the war. She's tall, as tall as I am, which probably puts a lot of guys off. Her long blonde hair makes me think of Veronica Lake for some reason, even though it doesn't fall over her eyes. It's pinned back like a proper lady's, which makes sense because she _is_ a lady. It's in her name and everything. Lady Jacqueline Falsworth. She's wearing a long blue dress that makes her eyes glow, and she's been telling me all day to call her Jackie.

"It's a specific flower, I think," I say. "And it's getting stronger." My shoe slips in the mud.

Jackie slips her arm into mine, smooth and ladylike and incidentally stopping me from falling on my ass. I wonder if English girls go to school to learn that stuff.

"That would be the lavender, I suppose," she says. "There's a large thicket east of the house. I'm surprised you can smell it from here."

"I've got a pretty good nose," I say, and leave it at that. Actually, it's been driving me crazy since I got out of Krausberg. The first day of the march back, the smell of a latrine made me vomit. 

I don't say that to Jackie, though. She's a Lady.

"It's a versatile herb," Jackie tells me. "Father had it planted when Hitler invaded France. It's rather symbolic, in a way."

"How's that?"

"It's very important in French cooking, so we use it quite a bit here at the house, and of course now we've lost access to proper French lavender. And it's used in perfumes, which aren't being made anymore. And it's traditionally associated with death. It's used in burials sometimes, to hide the smell. You've heard the phrase 'I'll see you in lavender'?"

"No," I say. "I don't think anybody says that in New York."

"Just as well. It's quite grim. To see one in lavender is to see one dead."

"Oh," I say. "We've got plenty of ways to say _that_."

She laughs. It's not a particularly cultured, aristocratic laugh. She laughs like something's really funny. I think I could get to like Jackie. It's too bad I'm leaving tomorrow.

"You're a remarkable man, Sergeant Barnes," she tells me, with one of her enigmatic smiles.

"Bucky," I say. "Everybody calls me Bucky. If you call me Sergeant, I've gotta call you Lady Jacqueline."

"Well, we can't have that," she says. "What's your Christian name?"

I hardly ever tell anybody, but it's different with her. "James," I say. "James Buchanan Barnes. But nobody calls me James."

"I will, if you'll allow it. I rather like the name. James."

From her, it sounds nice. "I guess it's okay by me." I glance back up the hill at the hulking shadow of the house. I've never seen a place that big, let alone for one family. Steve and the rest of the Howlers are probably still lost in the corridors. I'll have to get up a search party. The windows look like eyes, staring down at the dumb New York Irisher daring to take a walk with the princess.

"Shouldn't we head back?" I ask Jackie. "It's been an hour. Your brother'll get ideas." I don't mention that he's already got them. James Montgomery Falsworth—Jamie to his family, Monty to me and anybody else who can get away with it—only needed a look to tell me what he thought of my saying two words to Jackie. Lucky for me I can't take a hint.

She smiles at me. "I find it's best to ignore Jamie when he's being difficult. Besides, he owes you his life. The least I can do is show you around the garden. Fancy never seeing lavender!"

"That wasn't me that did that," I remind her. "That was all Steve. He saves people, not me."

"I'm sure you helped. Come along, James." She lengthens her stride, pulling me along. She's got long legs under that dress. "I'll show you the lavender, and you'll make me a promise."

"Uh-oh," I say, stumbling as I try to keep up. How does she walk so fast in high heels? "What kind of a promise?"

"A promise to write. Jamie's a dreadful correspondent, even when he's not a prisoner of war."

"Isn't that gonna look funny, me writing to my buddy's little sister?"

She looks back over her shoulder at me and smiles. It's still enigmatic, but now there's a gleam of mischief in it.

_She's nineteen, you jerk,_ I tell myself. _You're twenty-five. They're gonna arrest you for cradle-robbing. Monty will kill you, and Steve will never let you live it down._

But I know, just looking at her, that I'm going to write to her every chance I get. I don't think anybody can say no to Jackie Falsworth.

The scent of lavender is everywhere around us as we walk on, arm in arm.

The memory dissolves around me, and I'm back to floating in the dark, though the smell of lavender remains. I haven't thought about Jackie since I came back. Steve didn't ask about her, but I know he wondered. Just about the first thing he did when he woke up after the ice was think of Peggy and try to find her. That's the kind of guy he is.

But Jackie wasn't Peggy, and I'm not Steve. Jackie and me ... it was always complicated, and never anything like other people thought. Why complicate it even more with everything that's happened, everything I've done?

I looked up my family online before we flew to Zagreb. My parents died a long time ago, and even my sisters are all gone or impossible to find. I've got one elderly brother-in-law still hanging on, and a small gang of nieces and nephews and their kids and grandkids, but I've never met any of them, and if they even know I existed, they think I died in the war, backing up Captain America. That's how I'd want to go out, too, not as the Winter Soldier. I decided a while ago not to contact any of them.

And if I'm not bothering to call up my family, I certainly don't want to look for Jackie. If she's alive, she'd be what, ninety? I saw what finding Peggy did to Steve. And besides, what elderly lady would want to see me barging into her nice, orderly life with my arm and my past and everything else wrong with me? Nobody but Steve is actually happy to see me. If Jackie's still out there, she's better off without knowing that I'm still out there, too.

It was nice to visit, though. She was a great girl.

I drift a while, enjoying the dark, but I keep smelling that lavender. Am I imagining it, down here in sensory deprivation? Or is it real, an eyelid-flutter away?

Curiosity tugs at me, but I don't _want_ to wake up. The dark is nice. The dark is safe. I like the dark.

Oh, the hell with it. I let myself follow the scent.

As I float toward the surface, I hear the beep of a heart monitor. Great; another lab. When are people going to stop putting me in labs? I should get a tattoo— _Does not respond well to labs_. It'd save a lot of time.

The lavender smell is getting stronger. The beeps speed up. Everything starts to hurt—aching muscles, burned skin, and especially my throbbing head. But it's too late to go back. I'm like a diver rising toward the surface of the water. Buoyancy takes over. You can't fight physics. The scent of lavender fills my nose.

Some joker has put sandpaper on the insides of my eyelids, and my mouth tastes like it's had a dead mouse in it. I groan, open my eyes a little, and reach up with my right hand to rub the grit away.

Or at least I try to.

My arm doesn't want to move. I tell it to wake up and snap to, and I feel it tensing, but it doesn't rise. Concerned, I try my left arm. I hear the servos hum, but it's going nowhere. And that's when I notice the weight on my chest.

I force my eyes all the way open and blink several times to clear them. There's a coffered ceiling above me, painted off-white, but that's all I can see. I try to sit up and look around, but the pressure on my chest and arms increases, and as I strain against it, I hear the telltale creak of leather and cloth padding. I tuck my chin into my chest and look down to see a fat, padded strap across my upper ribs.

Restraints. I'm in restraints. That's not good.

The heart monitor is beeping like crazy. I might be panicking a bit.

"James."

I stop struggling and listen. Nobody calls me James. Especially not in a low alto voice with a British accent.

"Are you awake, then? Or having another nightmare?"

Nightmare? I don't remember any nightmares. I was in the dark, taking it easy. Other people have nightmares.

I roll my head to the left. I can see the room now, and it's definitely not a lab. Labs don't have subtly striped gold wallpaper or coffered ceilings. They don't have wooden wardrobes in the corners, expensive Persian rugs on the floors, or decorative credenzas holding a vase of flowers (none of which are lavender blossoms). The hospital bed, heart monitor, and IV wouldn't be out of place, but the chair beside the bed is—I don't know furniture, but it's got that carved, slightly curly look I associate with the terms "Louis" and "don't touch". 

Sitting in the chair is a tall, leggy woman in a simple blue dress. Her white hair is swept up and pinned back, and I recognize her face even before I realize the lavender scent is coming from her.

I start to reconsider the nightmare option.

"Jackie?" I croak. "What're you doing here?"

"You're in my house," she replies. Her sky-blue eyes are locked on my face. For the first time, I notice she's holding a little plastic box with a button on it. Her thumb rests on the button, but hasn't pressed it. She's not smiling. "What are _you_ doing here?"

"I ..." I swallow, try to clear my throat, and discover everything's too dry to work properly. "I don't ..."

"Eloquent as ever, I see." She sits back in the chair, but she doesn't relax. She's still holding the call button casually in her lap. I wish she'd smile.

I tug gently at the restraint on my right wrist. It's solid. What's going on?

"Why?" I ask, and cough. Obviously I'm not going to be up for long sentences very soon.

"Say something. Prove you're him."

I gaze at her in confusion. Her stare is as intense as I remember it. She is perfectly motionless, holding the call button at the ready. I can't read her expression at all. She's waiting for something. I feel like I'm back in school, taking a test I didn't study for.

I wrack my brain—that hurts, too—and finally say the only thing I can think of that only she and I would know.

"You showed me the lavender."

The change in her face is subtle, but immediate. The lines around her eyes move, her lips press more firmly together, and she draws herself up even straighter for a moment. Then, abruptly, she stands up, sets the button on the chair, and walks out.

"Jackie?" I ask, just before she closes the door. There's no answer. The door clicks shut, and it's just me, the beeping monitor, and the lingering scent of her lavender perfume.

I lie there, listening to the slow beep. I'm not scared anymore, just confused. Why am I in Jackie's house? Why am I in restraints? Where's Steve?

And is anyone going to unlock me before I have to pee?

I give my left-arm cuff a tug. I don't have the leverage to tear the cuff itself, though I think I could break it off the bed. I don't want to wreck anything of Jackie's, but I'm not sure how long I can handle being tied down. Now that she's out of the room, the beeps are speeding up. I make a metal fist and start to pull.

The door clicks open. I freeze.

Steve pokes his head in. "Buck? You awake?"

"Yeah," I say. "You okay?" I can't see any injuries as he steps into the room, but with a jacket and jeans on, that doesn't mean much. I have a vague memory of slashing his stomach with a combat knife.

"Fine. You know me, I'm always okay."

I don't believe him, but I let it slide. I want out of this bed. Steve comes and sits down in Jackie's chair, scooping up the call button as he does so. 

I rattle my cuffs meaningfully. "You wanna tell me what this is all about?"

"Huh? Oh, right." He leans over and undoes the strap on my left wrist, though he keeps glancing at my face as he unbuckles it. "We didn't know who was going to wake up, you know?"

I grimace and nod. "Is that why you went to Jackie? Some kind of, I dunno, Bucky test?"

"No." Steve unbuckles the chest strap, and I twist over to free my right arm. He lets me do it and continues: "I went to Jackie because I needed somebody in the Eurozone who could set up a private intensive-care unit in a hurry. You were in a bad way, Buck."

"Was I?" I sit up and start working on the hip and leg restraints. Damn, Jackie's thorough. "I don't remember."

Steve gives an exasperated grunt. "According to the doctors, you had a bunch of broken bones, burns over twenty percent of your body, _and_ hypothermia. That's before I had to clock you with the shield, too. Our mutual friend came out to play. Do you remember _that?_ "

No point in lying. He's giving me the same disappointed look he got when we were kids and he found out I'd stolen something. I look away and mutter, "Yeah."

"You said he was gone. You wanna talk about it?"

"No."

"Goddamn it, Bucky." I can feel his eyes on me. Steve almost never gets angry, but he's furious now. More than that, he's scared. I don't know whether the fear in his voice is because he's scared _of_ me or because he's scared _for_ me, but knowing I freaked out Captain America is just about the worst feeling in the world.

"What were you thinking?" he asks. "Were you thinking at all? You could've killed Sam."

_And you_ , I think, but I don't say it. I don't need to.

Steve rubs at his face and swipes at his hair. It's an old mannerism from Brooklyn. He's under a lot of stress.

"What are we gonna do, Buck?" he asks me, in a voice so low even I have trouble hearing it.

"I don't know," I answer, even more quietly.

Steve sighs. "How're you feeling?"

I stretch a little, twist around, test my bionic arm. I run my fingers through my hair, too. Part of it's burned brittle. I'm glad I don't have a mirror. The skin on my face and neck feels hot and tight. In a few places, it's already beginning to peel.

"Okay," I pronounce myself. "Kinda banged up. My head still hurts." I try a grin on him. "Payback?"

Steve's face doesn't twitch. He's not amused.

I let the grin fade. "I'm sorry, Steve. I didn't think it was going to get out of control like that. I wouldn't have done it otherwise."

"What _did_ you do, exactly? What happened in there?" He leans back in the chair and folds his arms. I feel like I'm giving a field report on a mission that went FUBAR. In a way, I guess I am.

"The machine is still there," I say, tapping my temple. "It's not like before—I can ignore it if I want to. So far, anyway. I can turn it on, I guess, when I need it."

Steve raises his eyebrows. He's not sold.

"I didn't think I could just act like ... our mutual friend," I continue. "He knows the protocols, the passwords, how to act inside. None of that's natural to me. So I turned the machine on, went in, and everything was normal until I got caught."

He winces at the word _normal_ , but doesn't comment on it. "What tipped 'em?"

"Nothing," I say, shaking my head. "Just my being there. I think Hydra's split into factions—they kept talking about something called Red Hydra. They thought I'd been sent to sabotage them. There was a fight, and I took a hit to the head."

"Cognitive recalibration," Steve says. He nods. "Like what Natasha did with Agent Barton."

"I guess. I got my bell rung pretty good, I know that. They beat about five kinds of crap out of me and tossed me into a cryo pod, the same one they used to keep me in. I passed out and woke up when the bombs started going off. I broke out, but between the concussion and the ice ... I wasn't all there, Steve. I didn't even know your name."

"I noticed." Steve rubs his jaw.

"How's Sam?" I'm dreading the answer.

"A little bruised, a little burned," Steve says. "And more than a little worried that you're on a suicide mission. I am, too."

"I'm not," I insist. I hope I'm not, anyway.

"Then why Zagreb? It wasn't exactly the softball you pitched before we left. That's not a starter mission, Buck. You had to take a hell of a risk just to get in the door. And you ended up on fire. How do you get hypothermia when you're on fire, anyway?"

I shrug. "Beats me. Cryo would explain the cold, but ..." I put my head in my hands and massage my temples. There's something in there, but I can't quite shake it loose. "I think I got thrown into an equipment rack in the fight," I say slowly. "I kind of remember my hair getting wet." I reach up to touch the scorched area. "Something must have spilled."

"You weren't burned when you first came out," Steve tells me. "You were just cold. What set it off?" 

"I don't know." I smack myself on the side of the head with my flesh hand. "I don't remember."

"Hey, cut that out," Steve orders. "You've got head trauma as it is."

"Yeah?" I retort. "Whose fault is that?"

"Yours, you jerk."

"Punk." I smile crookedly. "Thanks."

"Any time." Steve rolls his eyes. "But if I catch you playing with fire again, I'm calling your mother." He spits me with a look. " _Either_ kind of fire."

"Both our moms are dead, so nyah." I make a face at him. He smirks, but the worry doesn't leave his expression.

"I'm not kidding, Buck," he says quietly. "You can't let him out again. You didn't see yourself—you were completely gone. Keep that up and you could lose yourself for good."

I nod. I get it, I really do. But _he_ doesn't. "What if we need him again?" I ask.

Steve just studies me for a long moment. I wish I knew what he was thinking, but I can't quite read him like I used to. Somewhere along the line, he picked up a command face, a face that can send soldiers to die and not reveal how much it's tearing him up inside. I know it hurts him—he hasn't changed _that_ much—but when it really matters, he doesn't have to show me that it hurts. He actually won a hand of poker against me on the flight from Washington. Whatever he's thinking right now, he's hiding it deliberately. I wonder what's worth that cost.

Finally, he says, "Nobody needs anything that badly. He stays in the brig."

"Sir, yes, sir," I say dryly, and toss him a salute that would get me cashiered. He snorts. I swing my legs over to dangle off the side of the bed. I notice my boots are gone along with my shirt, and my ribcage is taped up. Again. _At least I didn't get shot this time_ , I think. _That's something._

A wave of dizziness rolls over me. Maybe walking ought to wait. I look up at Steve. "Hey, I got a question."

"Shoot."

"You said you went to Jackie because she's loaded. How'd you know that? How'd you know where to find her?" I ask it like I'm casually curious.

Steve grimaces. "If you want to know, it was an accident."

"Get outta town."

"After I thawed out, I went looking for anybody I knew. Turns out it's hard to find people from 1945, even with the internet. But the Howlers got veterans' benefits, so they had a paper trail. And I remembered this place," he looks around at the rich furnishings, "from when we were here that one time."

I nod. "1943. We had that leave before we shipped out. Monty Falsworth had us all up for the weekend. I remember."

Steve half-smiles. "It was a good couple of days. Anyway, I figured a place this big, centuries old, it might still be around. I called. Monty died in 1973, but Jackie's still running the place. She answered the phone, almost had a heart attack, and has been after me to visit ever since. I was too busy—right up until I wasn't."

"You're welcome," I say. "I'll get set on fire again sometime."

"It wasn't just that," he says. He leans forward, rests his elbows on his knees, and folds his hands conspiratorially. "Buck, nobody gets in here without a complete background check. She'd never have let me walk two uninvited guests in, no matter how badly they were hurt. We'd all have been off-site in some private hospital with guards all around us. A lot of people want to see Jackie dead, and you can ask her why yourself. But you know what? She let all three of us in, no questions asked. She didn't even blink at Sam, and she set you up in the downstairs guest room, sight unseen. You know why?"

I shrug. "Not a clue."

"Because I told her this was about Bucky Barnes."

My mouth falls open. 

"Is there anything I ought to know about you and her before we go out that door, pal?"

I feel like a fish, but I can't stop gaping. I can't imagine Jackie Falsworth living in a fortress, or people wanting her dead. And I certainly can't imagine her opening her gates just because Steve dropped my name. Bending over backwards for Steve Rogers, sure, that happens, but Bucky Barnes?

_James_ , she called me. Like the old days. And: _Say something. Prove you're him_. And she wore lavender ...

"Steve," I say hoarsely, "who does that button call?"

"This?" He holds it up. "Estate security. Pretty tough."

She was holding that the whole time. Her thumb was on the button. I was strapped to a bed, and her thumb was on the button.

"Sorry," I mutter. "I got nothing to say."

Steve eyes me, but he stands up anyway and holds out a hand. "C'mon. You've been out for two days, and Sam's got to yell at you, too."

"Great." I take the hand, pull myself to my feet, and let him come alongside me to help me stay upright. "Hey, can we find a shirt along the way? Maybe some shoes?"

"Whatever you need, pal."

We hobble out into a marble atrium, under a glittering chandelier and past a sweeping double staircase. Steve supports a lot of my weight, which would be embarrassing if we hadn't carried each other so often already. I never had a brother, but Steve does the job.

I feel the eyes on me before I look up, and I already know what I'm going to see. Jackie's standing at the top of the staircase, gazing down at us, her face a mask.

I try my sweetest, most appealing smile. She turns and vanishes through a doorway. 

Now Steve's eyeballing me again.

"Nothing to say," I repeat, and we shuffle out of the atrium without another word.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FUBAR: U.S. Army slang acronym. Stands for Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition. (A stronger form of SNAFU—Situation Normal, All Fucked Up.) Still in wide use, at least in the States, though I learned it from my career Army grandfather (a WWII vet born a year before Bucky) when my parents weren't paying attention.
> 
> "I'll see you in lavender" is attested in British English at least as far back as the Victorian period, from what I could find, though it was less common in the 1940s. Jackie, however, is the sort of person who likes words, among her many other interests. (Someday I WILL find a way to make her say my favorite bit of period British slang, "tuppence more and up goes the donkey".) Lavender perfume was very popular in certain circles right after World War II as trade with France opened back up. Bucky probably would not have smelled lavender on Jackie in 1943—unless, of course, there were lavender bushes in the neighborhood.
> 
> Yes, I know Steve saved Bucky very late in 1943 (November). It's my headcanon that the weekend at Falsworth Manor takes place sometime in December. Bucky likes Jackie a lot, to go for a walk outside for an hour in England in December.
> 
> Come be my friend on Tumblr and ruin a fascist's day. I am onethingconstant. :)


	5. The Modern Prometheus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everybody learns a little about Hydra, a lot about fire, and more than they ever wanted to know about a certain engagement.

**STEVE**

I help Bucky down the hall to the library of Falsworth Manor. I feel like a jerk for dragging him out of bed like this—he _should_ still be resting, and I know it—but I know he doesn't hold still very well. Another hour in that bed and he'd have been ready to kill somebody. Besides, he recovers faster when he's on the move. I learned that in Krausberg.

Whenever I shoot him a sideways look, Buck is staring straight ahead, apparently concentrating on walking. I want to ask him about what went on between him and Jackie, but even if he remembers clearly—which is a big _if_ —he obviously doesn't want to tell me. I guess it makes sense; I don't think I've ever said much to him about Peggy. Some things are meant to be private. But if he asked, I'd admit my curiosity is killing me.

The library is a cavernous room at the end of the hall, with enough books to put my apartment to shame. Sam's got a bunch of papers spread over a work table by the tall windows, and he looks up as we stagger in. Behind him, through the glass, I can see rolling green hills wreathed in fog.

"Well, if it isn't the human torch," he says, nodding at Buck. There's only a little sympathy in his voice. He's been nursing his burns since we arrived.

"Hey, Sam." Bucky flashes a wan smile. "Apples." He raises both hands in an attitude of mock surrender. Unfortunately, letting go of me makes him pitch forward toward Sam's table, and I have to catch my friend before he takes a faceplant.

I don't know what "apples" means to them, but Sam is not amused. He narrows his eyes.

"Sit your ass down and try not to go crazy for a couple of minutes," he tells Buck.

Bucky gives him a sloppy salute and collapses into a chair. He looks exhausted already. I pick up a sweatshirt off another chair—I've been nervously taking it off and putting it on all morning as English weather changes its mind—and toss it at him. He pulls it over his head and tugs it down over his bandaged torso. It's a little big on him, but not much.

_The last time Jackie saw him_ , I think, _he would've been swimming in that thing, boxer's build and all_. Bucky was a middleweight, tops, before the war. No wonder Jackie insisted on talking to him to verify his identity. However she did that—I know she asked him something, but there's no way he'll tell me what. Another secret he's keeping from me.

I tear my attention off the question of Bucky Barnes and Jacqueline Falsworth and sit down beside Sam, across from Buck. "Where are we?" I ask.

"Nowhere so far," Sam replies. "A lot of people at Interpol will talk to you when you put an Avenger on the phone for five minutes, but that doesn't mean they know anything. They lost a lot of manpower when their Hydra moles jumped ship, too, so they're really shorthanded. I think I've heard about a century's worth of hold music in the last couple of days, and I've still got nothing better than the list of bases Natasha put on the internet."

"What are you looking for?" Bucky asks.

"Connections between Zagreb and specific other Hydra bases," Sam tells him. "We _were_ trying to narrow down why you picked that place to hit first when it obviously wasn't what you thought it'd be." He lifts his eyebrows expectantly. "You got anything to add on that score?"

Bucky's eyes flick from Sam to me.

"Come on, Buck," I say quietly. "I know it hurts, but we need the intel. Whatever happened, it wasn't your fault."

"That's the problem," he mutters. "I don't really know what happened."

"Then why ...?"

Bucky's forehead knots up and his head sinks toward his chest. He looks like he's ten years old and trying to solve a really difficult long-division problem. I've gotten to know that look in the last few days. He's trying to remember something that Hydra tried to burn out of him. Usually it's something bad.

"Take your time," I say quietly, and that's when his eyes snap up to meet mine.

"The Van Eck house," he says. "It's like that."

I nod, immediately understanding.

"Translation?" Sam asks.

"The Van Eck house was a creepy old brownstone in Greenwich Village when we were growing up," I tell him. "It was abandoned before we were born, and there were all kinds of stories about it. Every kid in the city knew it was haunted, but every kid had a different reason."

"Most of the stories made no sense," Bucky chimes in. "You'd have eyewitness stories about murder sprees with no survivors. Ghosts with their heads under their arms, looking for their heads. Stuff like that."

"We all knew it was crazy, but everybody absolutely believed at least one of those dumb stories," I explain. "It was just that kind of house." I turn to Bucky. "So how is Zagreb like the brownstone?"

"You know how just walking past that house, you'd want to run away?"

I nod. "Yeah, you dared me to sit on the stoop that time."

That earns me a faint smile. "Heh. Well, Zagreb's like that in my head. It's got big 'No Trespassing' signs all over it. It takes a lot to spook our mutual friend, but that place did it."

"So you figured there had to be something really bad down there," I say. That makes sense. Bucky has always preferred to face his fears head-on. _He_ didn't need a dare to sit on that stoop. He climbed up there all by himself.

"Pretty much." Bucky's face is pale above the blue sweatshirt. "But the only thing I actually remember about it makes no sense. Something I saw in the labs one time. I think they had me helping with it somehow." He shakes his head, smacks it lightly. "I'm sorry, Steve. It's even more of a mess in here than usual, and this is going to sound crazy ..."

"God knows we've never seen _that_ before," Sam mutters.

"What is it?" I ask. "What did you see?" 

Bucky takes a deep breath.

"A man on fire," he says.

"They set someone on fire?" I ask. "Like you?"

"No, that hurt." He gingerly touches a burn on the side of his neck. "This guy ... he didn't seem to notice the flames. He was walking around in a big glass box, looking at things, sometimes sitting down—and he was covered in fire. But he never acted like it hurt or like he was scared. He just ... happened to be on fire."

"Do you remember his face?" Sam asks. "Any identifying marks?"

"Does being on fire count as identification?" Bucky deadpans. He shakes his head. "I'm sorry, guys. I'm sure I'm remembering it wrong. I just can't figure out what _he'd_ remember as a guy on fire."

"Possibly a man on fire."

We all turn to look toward the doorway. I stand up immediately, as soon as I see Jackie standing there, holding a manila folder. Sam shoots me a sideways look and stands up, too. Bucky puts his hands on the arms of his chair and tries to lever himself upright, but Sam reaches over and pushes him back down. He lands with a grunt, glares briefly at Sam, then turns his attention to Jackie with an expression that looks like dread.

Jackie ignores him. She walks into the library like a queen and sets her folder on the table.

"Have any of you ever heard of Horton cells?" she asks, looking from me to Sam and back.

"Never," I say. Sam shakes his head.

"Pity," she replies, and flips the folder open. "Because you brought a few million of them into my house." She spreads photos and computer printouts across the table. Most of the images look like blown-up microscope slides, but one of them shows a shadowy humanoid figure inside a glass cylinder. A sign above it reads, "The Synthetic Man". It's grainy black and white, but the people in the background ...

"I've seen this," I blurt, snatching it up. "Buck, take a look." I slide the photo across to him.

Bucky picks it up and peers at it. "Looks familiar," he agrees. "And old. There are men in hats in the background." He turns it over and reads a label. "World's Fair Exposition, 1942. Hey, isn't this—?"

"We went there," I agree. "The night before you shipped out, the night I met Dr. Erskine. We walked past this thing on the way to see Howard Stark's flying car."

"Trust you to remember that," he says with a shrug.

I turn back to Jackie. "What's this about?" 

She pulls up an empty chair and sits down, casually crossing her long legs under her blue dress. She doesn't move like she's ninety. Sam and I sit back down, too. 

"Phineas Horton was an American inventor of sorts," she explains. "His primary project—his life's obsession, really—was artificial life."

"What, like Frankenstein?" Sam asks. "Or robots?" 

"Neither," Jackie replies. "Horton began his work in the 1930s. The structure of DNA hadn't been discovered. Artificial intelligence was decades away. He didn't have the means to grow life or to impart it to nonliving matter, so he began with the building block of life as he understood it—he created a completely artificial cell."

"How?" I ask.

"With great difficulty." Jackie smiles. "Half his notes were destroyed in the war, but as far as anyone can tell, Horton built his cells using a variant on Otto Bayer's polyurethane compounds. He made them out of plastics."

"Is that even possible?" Sam asks.

"Until this morning, when I got the test results, the entire scientific community would have said no. Horton cells are an urban legend. Completely artificial, self-reproducing cells that can, like stem cells, take on the function of any cell in the human body. Supposedly that's how Horton built his Synthetic Man. Unfortunately, that's also how he destroyed himself, if you believe the stories."

"What happened?" I ask.

Jackie taps the photo in front of Bucky but still doesn't look directly at him. "If you saw Howard Stark's presentation, Steve, you must have been there during the exposition's final days. It ended when Horton demonstrated his creation, not long after Stark arrived. Horton claimed that his artificial cells converted oxygen into energy—his creation would not need to eat, only breathe. In this picture, the display chamber is also a vacuum chamber. During his presentation, he vented oxygen in to activate his creature—and it burst into flames."

"Did it burn up?" Bucky asks. He's sunk down in his chair like he's trying to make himself smaller. 

Jackie looks at me to answer. "It was more of a burning bush—aflame, but not consumed. It moved under its own power, and didn't appear to be in pain. That was too much for the crowd. A stampede broke out, and the glass was broken somehow. Four people were trampled to death, and about a dozen sustained burns when half the exposition went up in flames."

"So the creature escaped," Sam says. 

"No, that's the odd thing," Jackie replies. "According to witnesses, the synthetic man didn't go anywhere—he just followed Horton like a frightened child. Horton tried to help evacuate the fairgrounds, but the fire followed him around on two legs." She gives me a puzzled look. "You didn't hear about this?"

I shrug. "I left for basic the day after I went to the fair, and Bucky shipped out first thing in the morning. He was out at sea and I was busy. Figures we missed some news."

"It _was_ news," Jackie tells me. "The public outcry forced Horton to abandon his research. He sealed the creature in a vacuum tube and buried it in concrete. He died a year later from natural causes, probably including a broken heart."

"What happened to the creature?" Sam asks.

Jackie shakes her head. "The location of the burial site was in Horton's notes, which he kept in code, and as I said, half were destroyed. I wouldn't have believed anyone could find it if James hadn't been carrying Horton cells when he arrived."

"Who, me?" Bucky sits up straighter. He's still watching Jackie like a mouse watches a snake, but now he looks genuinely surprised.

Jackie calmly turns over a page to reveal a lab report. "Steve, your account of James suddenly catching fire made me think of the synthetic man. I had one of my people take samples from the burned areas—his hair, particularly, and his jacket."

Bucky reaches up to finger the blackened part of his hair. For the first time, I notice brown roots peeking through. He's already started growing it out. Good thing he slept for two days.

"He had these Horton cells on him?" I ask.

She nods. "A few million artificial plastic cells, by our count. They appear to be dead, and he probably sloughed half of them off getting out of bed, but they are there."

"That beaker that spilled on me during the fight," Bucky mutters. "It smelled funny."

"Then why didn't he burn in the lab?" Sam wants to know. "If he got doused in Horton cells then, why the delayed reaction?"

"Buck," I say slowly, "was it an open beaker? No lid or seal on it?"

"I think so," he says. "I didn't get a good look."

"It should've been burning already," I say, almost to myself. "They must have found a way around it."

"Anti-pyrotic gases in the lab ventilation system, most likely," Jackie says. "Developed in the sixties. They're mildly carcinogenic, but I doubt Hydra cares about that. The cells don't react well to cold, either."

"The cryo pod," Bucky says.

I agree. "So when he got up to the surface, warmed up, got some fresh air—"

"Instant fireball," Sam supplies. "Explains the burning hypothermia. That was weird, even for you guys."

"So Hydra's working with Horton cells," I say. "That sound bad to anybody else?"

"Prometheus. Holy shit."

Everyone looks at Bucky—even Jackie, I notice. He's got a hand on the side of his head again, and his long-division face is back. 

"The base commander said something about Prometheus," he says slowly. "They were talking about putting me in cryo, then using the chair. Something about testing a program before Prometheus arrives."

"Prometheus, the guy who stole fire from the gods?" Sam interjects. "This just keeps getting better."

"What chair?" Jackie asks. Now she's glancing from me to Bucky and back. I didn't tell her about Bucky's time as the Winter Soldier, and I definitely didn't mention mind control. It's not the kind of thing you tell people about your best friend. All I said was that Bucky had been badly hurt, he'd lost some of his memories, and he might be confused or hurt himself when he woke up. I wanted to give Buck the chance to tell her his own story—as much or as little as he wanted her to know. And now is not the time to open that can of worms.

"You think they're going to put this synthetic man in ... you know?" I ask Bucky.

He doesn't say anything, just gives a twitchy little nod. His eyes are wide and haunted.

"A weaponized artificial man," Sam says quietly. "Now that I _know_ is bad."

"Thank you for this," I tell Jackie. "We'd have been spinning our wheels a long time without it. Now we've got a target, at least."

"You'll have a lot more than that," she says with a dry smile. "I may be officially retired, but I still know where a few bodies are buried. Give me an hour to make some calls, and I can probably find you a list of other Hydra bases with the ability to culture Horton cells. I assume you'll want to do what you do best?"

"If Hydra wants fire," I say, "we'll give them fire."

Jackie's smile widens into something frightening.

"I'll help," Bucky pipes up.

"You can hardly walk," I point out.

"First, gimme a day and I'll fix that, wiseass," Bucky says with a ghost of his trademark smirk. "And second, I wasn't talkin' to you." He looks to the white-haired woman sitting to his left. "Jackie, if you think it'll help, I know more about Hydra bases than anybody. I'll do whatever you say." He's almost pleading.

Jackie blinks in surprise and looks at me for confirmation. I nod and shrug, as if to say, _It's true, don't ask me how_. She looks back at Bucky, who meets her eyes for the first time since she walked in.

"I'm gonna say it if nobody else will," Sam says into the sudden quiet. "I've been trying to be polite about this ever since we got here, but I can't take it anymore. Steve, who is this scary woman?" He hooks a thumb at Bucky. "And how the hell did he get engaged to her? Because she is way out of his league."

Bucky's jaw drops.

"Hey," I tell Sam reprovingly.

"Oh, like I'm the first person to wonder that," Sam retorts, but he's grinning.

I look over at Jackie. She's smiling and seems to be trying not to laugh, her fingers pressed to her lips in an echo of public-school manners. She looks a good thirty years younger all of a sudden, and I can see traces of the girl Bucky must have fallen for all those years ago.

Who am I kidding? The way he's staring, he never stopped falling. For a minute I picture Peggy sitting in that chair, laughing silently at my astonishment, and I ache. But it passes quickly. I can't be jealous of my best friend.

Bucky is still gaping. "You told him?" he asks Jackie.

"Not a word," she replies, and there's mirth in her voice, too.

"Nobody told me, Buck," I say. "I found the letter. Though I thought you had more class than proposing by V-mail." I grin.

"Son of a bitch." Bucky hides his face in his right hand, but I can see all of his exposed skin turning red. It takes a lot to make him blush at all, let alone with his entire body. "You're a punk, Steve."

"Jerk."

"Would somebody please subtitle this conversation?" Sam is smirking from ear to ear. "I'm missing some quality blackmail material."

"James?" Jackie asks. Amusement bubbles from the syllable. She's enjoying this.

Bucky waves his metal hand at her and keeps his face covered. "You want to tell 'em, you tell 'em. I'm not saying anything. Anybody asks, I've got Swiss cheese for a brain."

"Another thing that hasn't changed," Jackie retorts, but she's still smiling. Bucky's right hand moves, the fingers spreading just enough that I can see one hazel eye peeking through at her. I can't tell if he's smiling back. I hope he is.

"All right." Jackie turns her narrow-eyed smile on me. "Steve, you would appear to hold all the trumps in this little drama. Be so good as to end James' agony by telling what you know." She arches a silver eyebrow. "Little as it may be."

I laugh nervously. I had really hoped to get the story out of one of them in private, but ten minutes after I met Jackie, I knew that wouldn't happen, at least on her end. And there was no way to be sure Bucky even knew about the arrangement at this point—his memory's a wreck. But I know what Sam would say. Buck and I need the good memories to balance out the bad ones. Finding that envelope tucked into his kit bag was more bittersweet than good, but it was a little ray of light on a dark day all the same. It'll be good for both of us.

"I first met Jackie," I tell Sam, "through her brother, James Falsworth. Monty, we called him. He was locked up with Buck and the other Howlers in that factory near Azzano. After we busted out, he signed on to help fight Hydra with us, and before we shipped out, he had the whole squad up to his family estate," I gesture at the sprawling building around us, "for a weekend."

"Our parents insisted," Jackie agrees. "They'd all but given Jamie up for dead, and you brought him back to us. They had to meet you, at least."

"They were nice folks," I say. "Very gracious. And you were there, Jackie. You came down from Oxford, right?"

"Just for your visit, yes. I was bored until you lot arrived."

"Ha. Yeah." I smile at the memory. "You wanted to go dancing in town, and Buck was—"

"The only one mad enough to go with me." Jackie laughs.

"I remember you two were thick as thieves after that," I say. "I thought Monty was going to explode."

Jackie's eyes sparkle. Bucky keeps his face hidden.

"Anyway," I continue, "after we left, Jackie started writing to Buck and Monty both. I never found out what happened to most of those letters, though. Monty kept his, I know that. But ..." I hesitate. This is the hard part.

This time Bucky flicks his metal hand at me. "Keep going," he mutters. "I wanna know what happens."

"After Bucky, well—" I'm not sure what word to use.

He says it for me. "Died."

"Yeah. It was my job to pack up his stuff and send it to his family. I figured it was what he would have wanted, so I went through his pack and his kit bag, looking for anything worth mailing." I swallow; after the day Bucky fell, that was probably the worst day of my life. "I found a V-mail letter from Jackie, accepting his proposal. It was dated a few months earlier. I don't know why he didn't tell me about it."

I pause, waiting for Bucky to break in. He doesn't twitch.

"You kept it," Jackie remarks to him. "I always thought that rather charming."

Bucky's flush is scarlet now.

"I showed the letter to Monty so he could break the news," I continue. "He didn't think Jackie would want it back, so I packed it and sent it to Brooklyn, along with a note. I think Buck or Monty had a picture of you, too, Jackie, and I sent that. I told 'em all about you, said you were a nice girl and that they would've liked you."

Bucky lowers his hand, revealing his eyes. "You told my _mom?_ "

"I figured she deserved to know. You were dead, Buck."

"You're a punk. I mean it. You're a punk." He glares.

"What?" I ask. "Were you gonna get married and _not_ tell your folks?"

His eyes flick sideways. "Jackie? For God's sake, help me out."

Jackie's smile turns sad. Bucky's girl is gone now, replaced by what I suppose must be the young woman he left behind. Peggy's told me a little about her life after I went into the ice, but only a little. I wonder what it was like for Jackie.

"I suppose I'd better fill in the gaps, then," she says at last. "Beginning with this—James and I never intended to wed."

Silence. Now Sam and I are gaping.

"But—" I begin.

"It was a joke," Jackie said grimly. "More of a favor, really. I first took up with James because it offended my parents, but we soon discovered we genuinely liked each other. As friends only, however. Those letters were mostly full of jokes and talk about music."

"Then why did he—" Sam interrupts.

"I asked him to," Jackie cuts him off. "I had a friend in Intelligence who told me they were looking for people. I wanted to help, to fight like Jamie was, but my parents forbade me to go. They considered it unseemly," she smiled bitterly, "for an unmarried girl of our class to be working with all those men. My husband might feel differently, but my father was adamant. I considered solving the problem by simply marrying the nearest young soldier ... but I thought James would understand." She reaches across the table, takes Bucky's human hand off his face, and squeezes it in her own. "I suggested the plan. He sent me back a rather flowery proposal letter. I accepted and went off to war. Nobody looks twice at a well-bred woman fighting the Nazis when her fiancé is doing the same thing. I parachuted into France that fall to join the resistance. It was half a year before I heard James was dead."

I look at Bucky's face. I might as well be staring at a wall.

"After the war," Jackie continues, "I stayed in intelligence. SHIELD, MI5, MI6—I was good at it. I liked it. I was never chained to this house or any other." She gives me a defiant blue-eyed stare. "Steve, you saved my brother's life, and I am forever grateful for that. But James won my freedom. You are here because of him. Remember that, and don't mock."

She stands up into the perfect silence of two shocked men and one surly one. She walks around behind Buck, releases his hand, and touches him lightly on his right shoulder, the real one. "I would appreciate your help," she tells him. "Come find me when you can." She gazes at me and Sam in turn. Her eyes are suddenly very old. "You'll have your list of targets tomorrow."

And she walks out.

The door clicks shut behind her. Nobody speaks for a long time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. Yes, the "Synthetic Man" exhibit really was in TFA. You can see him in the Expo scene. It was a reference to Marvel Comics #1 (1939), which featured the origin of the Human Torch, which went ... well, very much like it's described here, except for what happened after the burial. The Expo would not have lasted long after the Torch was unveiled.
> 
> 2\. My take on Horton cells is very much indebted to Mike Carey, whose miniseries "The Torch" is well worth reading if you like that sort of thing at all.
> 
> 3\. No, Bucky and Jackie were not an item in the comics. Bucky had a little crush on her, but no more than he had on every pretty girl he ever saw. Fun fact: in my head, Jackie is played by a British-accented Lauren Bacall.
> 
> 4\. V-mail was a kind of mail used by the Allies forces during WWII. It was cheaper than regular mail, but only because all the letters were photographed, microfilmed, and reproduced at their destination ... which meant ANYBODY could have read Bucky's proposal. Which was rather the point, of course, but you can see why Steve found it declassé.
> 
> 5\. The Van Eck brownstone isn't precisely Marvel canon ... but it's basically Doctor Strange's spooky house in the Village, enchanted to look abandoned. Yeah, just imagine little Steve and Bucky daring each other to go sit on THAT stoop. And imagine Stephen Strange watching out the window in amusement.
> 
> Come be my friend on Tumblr! I am onethingconstant there too, and my blog is full of Marvel goodness and opportunities to ruin a fascist's day.


	6. One of the Good Parts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tea and espionage, followed by sandwiches and apologies, and then explosions and a guest star.

**BUCKY**

After Jackie walks out, I can feel Steve and Sam staring at me. I want to make a dramatic exit of my own, but just thinking about walking around makes me dizzy. I've got to stay put for a while. I probably should have stayed in bed.

But I'm here, and I'm awake, and there's work to be done. I pull Jackie's papers over to me and start reading.

"Well," Sam says, two pages in. It figures he'd be the one to break the silence. "I wasn't expecting _that_."

"Yeah?" I don't bother looking up. "What did you expect?" There's a sharp edge in my voice that I didn't put there, but I leave it in. I don't want to talk about this. I don't want to talk, period. Most of all I don't want to talk to Sam Wilson, who learned the major events of my life out of history books. God, I feel old.

"Buck," Steve says quietly. Him I look up for. He's got that sad, worried expression I'm beginning to recognize. "I'm sorry," he says. "I didn't know."

"No, you didn't," I snap back. "'Cause I didn't tell you. Wonder why."

He rocks back in his chair like I slapped him. I want to apologize—he's the only guy alive I'd apologize to for anything less than murder—but I'm too angry to form the words. And there's no point in being in a room with Steve when I'm this pissed.

I plant my hands on the table, brace, and heave myself to my feet. I sway a moment, dizzy, then find my balance.

"Let me—" Steve starts to get up.

"No." The word comes out as a growl. I'd rather fall on my face than take help from anybody right now, even Steve.

He sits back down, looking hurt. I haven't yelled at him since I came back. Hell, I don't think I've yelled at him since Krausberg. It's like I've kicked a puppy.

I take a deep breath, focus everything I've got on my balance, and step away from the table. It takes me longer than it should, and I almost fall a couple of times before I get to the door, but I make it. I walk out under my own steam.

Once I'm in the hallway, out of my friends' sight, I start grabbing doorframes and side tables to help myself along. I really should've stayed in bed. 

I'm not sure why I'm mad at Steve. He didn't know what happened—or didn't happen—between me and Jackie. He said and did what made sense with the information he had. And it's not like my mom's going to give me an earful for not marrying that nice English girl.

I think what bugs me is that Steve thought it was funny. Of course, it _was_ funny—that's why I didn't tell him in the first place. But it's stopped being funny to me since I came back. Ever since I left New York, I've wanted more than anything to be human—to feel human again. I've wanted to be some version of Bucky Barnes, not the Winter Soldier. And while I wasn't kidding about the Swiss-cheese brain and the giant gaps in my memory, I do remember Jackie. I remember taking a shine to her, writing her letters, wanting to help her out. I remember how smart she was, and how stupid we both thought it was that she wasn't allowed to join the war effort just because her folks wanted to get her hitched before she did anything in life. And I think that getting engaged to Jackie Falsworth—even though we both knew it was a lie, even though it was just so she could fight a war and I could help a pretty girl—was the most human thing I can remember doing. Crazy, but human.

I want to be human, and I'm not quite ready for that to be funny to Steve Rogers.

It takes a long time to search a giant manor house when you're clinging to walls like a drowning swimmer. Eventually I run into a guard who tells me Lady Jacqueline is on the veranda, and gives me directions, and doesn't give me too much crap about refusing a hand out there.

The whole way out, I'm thinking: _Super-soldiers heal fast. Super-soldiers heal fast. Super-soldiers heal fast._ I really hope that's true.

The flagstones outside are cold under my bare feet. Jackie's sitting at a small garden table, laptop and papers spread out around her, cup of tea at her elbow. Very English. She looks up at me and blanches.

I wave off her concern—right-handed, because I never know whether the left will make things worse. "It's fine," I say as I hobble toward her. "I've got it."

"Idiot," she replies, and stands up and hurries over. I let her slip an arm under mine, just like when we went to see the lavender.

"I'm okay," I insist. "I can walk."

"You're going to break your neck," she retorts. "Sit down before you fall."

"Yes, ma'am."

Ninety years old or not, my fiancée can really dimple.

I make it into a chair, she sits down across from me, and we both eye each other for several seconds. I don't care how much etiquette training Jackie's got; it can't have prepared her for this. I decide to make it easy on her.

"How've you been?" I ask. "The last seventy years, I mean."

"All right," she acknowledges. "A career in espionage. A little off-the-books skullduggery, too. An inheritance." She gestures languidly at the gigantic house. "A husband, now gone, and two children, now estranged." That gets a fond, sad smile. "A life. You?"

The thought of marriage and a family makes my stomach hurt. Something else I was going to do after the war—a chance I'll never get now, I guess. 

"Espionage, huh?" I push up the left sleeve of Steve's sweatshirt, revealing my shiny metal forearm. "I guess you saw this when I got here."

"It made a vague impression," she admits dryly. "As did your face. At first I thought you were a great-nephew, or a bastard grandson with bad genetic luck. Even after Steve told me you were who you looked like, I wasn't convinced."

"How would I have a bastard grandson?" I ask, grinning.

"You were a soldier. I'm English, not a moron."

I chuckle. It makes my ribs hurt, but it feels good anyway. "I've missed you, Jackie. I'm glad you're okay."

"And I you." She takes a sip of her tea.

"Don't jinx it. I'm only partly okay, working on the rest. Tell me, beautiful—all those years in intelligence, did you ever hear of the Winter Soldier?"

"Of course. Ridiculous story. Immortal Russian assassin who could pass perfectly for an American, most easily identified by his—" She pauses and looks at my arm. "You're not serious."

"I wish I weren't." I push the sleeve down. "Russian Hydra, actually. On paper, I worked for the KGB. And while they pumped me full of plenty of drugs, I don't _think_ I'm immortal. They froze me between missions, programmed me whenever they thawed me out. Kind of like what happened to Steve, except I was sometimes awake and wanting to put a bullet in my brain. And I killed a lot more people than he did in that glacier."

"Programmed?" Jackie asks quietly.

"That's what the chair did," I say. "Mind control. You don't think I'd work for Hydra any other way, do you?"

"I suppose not. You're more the sort to spit in their eye, damn the torpedoes." Now the smile is pointed at me. "I always liked that." She looks down at her papers. "Is that how you came to know so much about Hydra bases, then, or was that a clever ruse to get away from Steve?"

"Hmpf." I shake my head. "Both, I think. He kinda made me mad. He never used to do that."

"Or you don't remember it. Seventy years is a long time." Jackie glances up, studying my face as if she means to memorize it. "How did you break free? Hydra wouldn't just let you go."

"Steve. They sent me after him. I don't know if they knew who I was anymore, but ..." I shake my head. That piece of my memory is like a car wreck, all bright flashes and disconnected pieces and reconstructed bits I was told about later. "He shook something loose in my head. Got me to speak English, even—I hadn't done that in years. After that, the thing they'd made me into just started to fall apart. I've never been so terrified in my life. I didn't know who he was, who I was. I attacked him, beat him half to death trying to make him stop talking. But at the end, he broke the programming." I rub the back of my neck self-consciously. My hand moves to my jaw. I need a shave, I realize. "He damn near broke both of us, too, though. He ended up in a hospital, and I lost my mind for a while."

"He saved you." Jackie's eyes don't leave mine.

"It's what he does," I say.

"I'm sure you helped." It's what she said all those years ago, but it's less funny now.

"Helped?" I laugh bitterly. "I did what I do—kill. Or I tried. I just happened to fail this time. Is that helping?"

"Does the Winter Soldier often fail twice in a row?"

I blink at her, not getting it yet.

"Once in D.C., once in Zagreb. Terribly sloppy work for a famously efficient assassin. I keep up with the gossip, you know. And what kind of ex-spy would I be if my guest room weren't bugged?"

I take a minute to digest that. Then I say, "Were you really gonna call your security team on me if I didn't pass your test?"

Jackie gives me a long, slow look. Then she says: "I don't know. It's not often I say that."

The intensity of her stare is making me uncomfortable. I feel like I'm rubbing my face a lot. I should've gotten a shave before I came out here. It doesn't seem right, sitting here talking to Jackie when I look like I slept under a burning bridge.

Last time I found myself in this place, I was in uniform, spit-polished and at my most charming, and Jackie was a girl down from university. Now I'm in Steve's old sweatshirt, half-robot and at my most disoriented, and Jackie looks like my grandmother even though she's still six years younger than I am. The world is upside down. I'm beginning to see why Steve acts a little nuts sometimes. I'm also beginning to see why he prefers to focus on work.

"Pass the intel," I say with my best crooked smile. "I'll see what I can do."

For the next couple of hours, we talk about nothing but Hydra. We look at field reports and floor plans, electricity and water usage, equipment rundowns. This is how a lot of real intelligence work gets done—digging through boring details. Horton cells can be cultured, but they have high maintenance costs. I haven't read a science book since about 1940, and a lot has changed, but Jackie catches me up on what I need to know to do the work. She's as sharp as ever, and she assumes I'm bright enough to absorb what she's saying without repetition or elaboration. Mostly she's right, too. It's great to find something my brain's still good for. I always liked science in school—liked almost everything, actually. It's like stretching muscles that haven't gotten a workout in a while.

The sun moves while we work. It hides in the fog, peeks out, ducks back in again. The shadows are getting short when we manage to cross the eastern European bases off the list.

"Good," I say to that. "I'm sick of speaking Russian."

Jackie tosses off a perfect Russian sentence. It's completely untranslatable into English, and it's one of the filthiest jokes I heard in the entire Cold War. She catches me gaping at her and smiles mischievously.

"English," she says. "Not dead."

I laugh so hard my chest hurts, and one of the servants comes out to tell us lunch is ready.

I don't know what Steve and Sam have been doing all morning, but they show up in the dining room and scarf down sandwiches with us. Nobody talks much. I think about apologizing to Steve now that I've cooled off, but I end up not saying anything. I sit on Jackie's side of the table, and the other guys sit on theirs. At least I'm walking without reeling now, and I'm not dizzy anymore. That almost makes up for the awkward silence.

Jackie and I finish eating first, and we excuse ourselves to get back to work. Steve stands up and follows us to the door.

"Buck," he says, putting out a hand to stop me. I halt before I hit it.

"Yeah?" I say, keeping my voice neutral and not looking at him.

"You're lookin' better." The Brooklyn accent gets stronger when he's talking to me.

"Guess so. The fresh air's helpin'." It's not just _his_ accent. 

"That's good. You two make any progress?"

What does he think we were doing, sipping tea? Okay, Jackie was, but we were working too.

"Gettin' there," I say. "We've got some candidates."

"That's good," he repeats, then hesitates before he finally spits it out. "Listen, I was outta line."

I want to say _Yeah, you damn well were_ , but it's Steve, so I go with, "S'okay."

"I mean it, Buck. I shouldn't've poked my nose in. Or before, either. I gotta remember I'm not givin' you orders anymore."

"Yeah, you were never so good at that anyway." I smirk a little. "Sam put you up to this, didn't he?"

Steve looks sheepish. "Maybe."

"Save us from amateur shrinks." I roll my eyes heavenward and put a hand—the right, always the right—on Steve's shoulder. "It's okay, pal. Honest. I'm tougher than I look, you know that. I can take a little bit of stupid."

Steve grins. "Good, 'cause God knows we've got plenty of that."

"No kiddin'." I let go of him and take a step forward. He drops his hand, clearing my way. I toss off a little two-fingered salute and head off after Jackie, who's stopped in the middle of the hallway to wait for me.

It's weird, I think. Jackie's silhouette is the same, the lines of her face—she even wears her hair swept up in a similar style. From a distance, she's the same woman she always was. It's only up close that the lines in her skin and the white in her hair remind me that it's not 1943 anymore. And Steve's the same way. He looks like the guy I followed into a dozen Hydra strongholds, but then he says or does something I'd never expect. Like worry about me.

"All friends again?" Jackie asks as she falls into step beside me.

"We never _weren't_ friends," I answer.

"You frighten him."

I scoff. "Nothing frightens him. He's Captain America."

"That's why you frighten him," she replies. "He's not Captain America to you. You're his oldest, best friend, whom he loves. And with love comes the potential for loss. He's afraid of losing you."

"I told him, he's stuck with me."

"Even so." She quickens her pace, heading back outside.

I jog to catch up. Through the glass door, I can see enough light to tell me the sun's back out. "How'd you get so smart?" I ask. "I don't remember you being this smart."

"Charming," she says dryly. "James, if you live to be ninety years old, have a few children, and garrote a few Nazis along the way, you will be surprised at what you learn."

"Huh. I never garrotted anybody. I'll add it to my to-do list." I say it bright and cocky, but the words feel like lead in my mouth. No, _I've_ never garrotted anyone. But my fingers remember the pull of the wire, and I can feel for half a second what it's like to have a slowly strangling body pressed up against me. Winter Soldier memories. And what have I learned? Nothing I want to know.

I open the door for her. "C'mon," I say. "I bet we can cross off Spain. Loser makes the tea."

She laughs. "You don't know how."

"That's okay. I'm going to win anyway."

We do eliminate Spain's Hydra facilities, and Portugal, and Italy. Austria and Germany take a while, but Holland doesn't have a lot of Hydra activity and nobody would hide a burning killer robot in Belgium. Scandinavia's got the wrong kind of infrastructure. Denmark is a joke. We keep working. By late afternoon, we've zeroed in on France. By sunset, we've found it.

"Too bad," Jackie says. "I always liked Paris."

"Avenue Foch," I mutter, looking at a map. "Near the Champs-Elysées. That's bad. Talk about a target-rich environment."

"I thought you preferred those." I can hear the smile.

I give her a rueful look. "I'm a sniper, remember? A big crowd of tourists running around in a panic—that's a nightmare. Steve's gonna hate this."

"But it's where they're keeping the synthetic man," Jackie replies. "So that's where you'll go."

"Yeah." I stand up, still looking down at the spread-out maps, reports, photos, and legal pads full of lists and cross-outs. I don't like the result, but I'm proud of the work that produced it. _I did this_ , I think. _I did something that wasn't busting heads_. It feels great.

"James."

I look over at Jackie. She's still seated, studying me, her face a mix of concern, sadness, and something I can't quite read.

"If I had known," she says, "if I had seen the signs—"

I hold up my flesh hand. I know where this is going. "There was nothing to see, Jackie," I say. "They did a good job on me. I wasn't just hidden, I was gone."

"Even so." She stares, unblinking. "If I had known you were alive, if I had known you were a prisoner—I would have come for you. No matter the cost."

"I know," I say. "And I would have killed you. And that would have made everything," I flex my left hand, hear the plates click and the servos whir, "a whole lot worse."

"You sound terribly sure of the outcome."

"I've thought a lot about it," I admit.

Jackie leans back in her chair, resting her spine against the back for once. "How much do you remember?" she asks. "About the war, and—afterward?"

"Sometimes very little," I tell her. "Sometimes everything. And before you ask—I always remember you, Jaq. You were one of the good parts. Sometimes the only good thing in all of it."

"Flatterer." She stands up and walks around the table to me. I don't back away as she reaches up—not very far up, because she's still a tall woman and the serum only made me a little taller myself—and slips her fingers into my hair, the burned part as well as the surviving brown. Her hand is cool against my scalp. She tilts my head gently down, just enough to kiss me on the forehead.

It's not a lover's kiss, or a mother's or a grandmother's. It's warm and friendly and nothing but what it claims to be. Like the Jackie I remember.

I haven't been kissed since 1944. This is a good one.

"Where'd you learn to do that?" I ask, straightening up as she lets me go. I give her my cocky-kid smile, the one I would've shown her in '43. "Paris?"

"Everywhere," she says.

I touch the spot. The kiss was warm, but my skin is cool now where we touched. I lean in and kiss her back, on the cheek.

"Something to remember me by," I say. "You're a hell of a woman, Jackie Falsworth." A thought occurs. "Or whatever your married name is."

She dimples. "Crichton. But I went back years ago. I think I prefer the name I began with."

"I know just what you mean." This time I offer my arm for her to take. We walk inside like that, talking about nothing and laughing occasionally.

We find Steve and Sam in the library, doing their own research on Horton cells and their creator. Jackie slips her arm out of mine just before the guys look up, and she flashes me an impish grin. She's really having fun with this.

"Paris," I announce, dropping the folder with our findings on the table. "Let's go get these bastards." I glance at Jackie. "Pardon my French."

"You should hear what they're called _in_ French," she replies, opening the folder. Her voice is cooler now, and I watch her brief Sam and Steve on our findings for all the world as if she didn't know anyone in the room. It's my first real glimpse of the professional spy she became after I died. She's good, too. No wasted words, no verbal tangents, but nothing left out either. Steve keeps glancing at me while Jackie talks, like he expects me to take over, but I don't budge. It's her show.

When she finishes, Sam says, "I'm not gonna lie. When I said I'd always wanted to see Paris, I didn't mean blow up a landmark in Paris."

"Too bad," I reply. "If Prometheus is ready to be programmed, there's a mission waiting for him, and it's probably time-sensitive. We're on the clock here."

"You fit to fight, Buck?" Steve asks.

I look him in the eye. Maybe I'm healing fast or maybe it's just getting kissed, but I feel fifty feet tall. "I am," I say, with complete conviction.

"As am I," Jackie adds.

I actually hear all three of our heads snap around to stare at her. "You're kidding," I say. "Jackie, you've been a huge help, but you're kinda retired."

"For a good reason," Steve adds.

"I'm younger than either of you two relics," Jackie points out, looking from Steve to me. " _And_ I have more field experience."

"Jaq, no," I say quietly. "It's way too dangerous."

"More or less dangerous than sending in a pararescue with no tunnel training, a man with self-described Swiss cheese between his ears, and a super-soldier who can't operate an MP3 player?" Jackie smooths out a map of France. "I spent a year fighting to liberate Paris. I'm damn well not going to let Hydra burn it. Besides, I'm not an idiot. I'm volunteering as support staff. You need someone to monitor communications and keep track of movement inside the bunker. If you'd had that in Zagreb," she nudges me with a bony elbow, "James wouldn't have got hypothermia."

I shift my weight uncomfortably. "I never like discussing a woman's age, Jackie, but you're ninety years old. This is nuts, and you know it."

"Captain Rogers, I think it's time you chimed in," Jackie says to Steve. "Care to enlighten the room?"

Steve folds his arms.

I frown at him. "Steve? What's up?"

Steve scowls. "Jackie tells me—and I don't have the lab tests—that she's an Infinity agent."

"What's that?" I ask. Sam echoes me.

Steve makes a face like he's trying to unstick corn from a molar. "It's a SHIELD legend is what it is. Natasha told me there used to be a terrorist group called Zodiac that was working on something called the Infinity Formula. It was supposed to preserve youth when it was taken regularly. Very little was made, but over the years, a number of SHIELD agents and other ops got it. Mostly they were used as unwilling guinea pigs in the early test stages."

"I don't foul up often," Jackie says, "but when I do it's memorable. Zodiac caught me in '63. I got a dose before I was able to escape. Horrid stuff, but according to the doctors, I've got the body of a sixty-year-old."

The penny drops. "All those guards," I say.

"Precisely. I know a lot of secrets, lads, but I happen to _be_ a much bigger one. They're here to make sure no one gets the formula from me. In the event of my death, they have instructions."

"Sixty's still up there for field work," Sam says doubtfully.

"Any other candidate you've got, I'll challenge to single combat," Jackie says blandly. "Did someone say something about being on a clock?"

I look at Steve. He's glaring. I catch his eye and lift my eyebrows as if to say _Well? C'mon, she's got a point._

Now Steve is glaring at _me._

I make my best mock-innocent face and mouth _Peggy_. And I see in his face that I've won.

"Oh, man," Sam groans. "Those guards are former SAS. I talked to 'em. There's only three of us!"

Jackie smiles like a fox. "Honestly, Mr. Wilson. What kind of retired spy do you take me for?"

*

Twenty-four hours later, I'm crouched outside an outlet grate in a Paris sewer, listening to call-outs in my earpiece.

"Falcon is go," says Sam.

"Eagle is go." That's Steve.

"Raven," I mutter. "Check." I'm just glad I talked Jackie out of making me "Bluejay."

"Happy hunting, gentlemen," Jackie murmurs in my ear. "Do try not to singe your feathers."

I hit the fuse on my shaped charge and take cover behind a support pillar. The muffled _whoomph_ takes out the grating and the sensor package. I hop over the still-smoking rubble and head into the base. I picked the sewer approach for myself, partly as a favor to Sam and partly because the lowest levels of the complex are the most secure—and therefore the most likely place to keep the synthetic man and the gear needed to program him.

Steve and I have ten bucks riding on which of us will find the lab first. Plus I really want to blow up a mindwipe chair.

I move quickly up the pipe. This is an emergency escape route, so it's relatively clear of obstacles, and the sensors I find are bog-standard Hydra issue, easy to disable.

Ha. Bog-standard. I've been hanging around Jackie too much; I'm even thinking in British slang.

I'm still smirking about that when I step around a corner and hear a soft noise. I jerk back into cover at super-soldier speed and something whizzes past my nose. I frown, try to peer around, and hear the noise again. This time my bionic arm moves on reflex as I duck back, and snatches something out of the air.

I stare at what I've caught, baffled.

It's a long, black, wickedly pointed arrow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. Yes, Bucky's conversation is adapted from one he had with Nat in the comics. Sue me; it's one of my favorite scenes ever.
> 
> 2\. The Infinity Formula is a thing in the comics. It's why Nick Fury was able to stay head of SHIELD from the 1950s to the 2010s. Fun fact: Bucky Barnes is the last known person to receive a dose (Fury gave him the final remaining dose to save his life after the events of Fear Itself), so Bucky's aging process is officially unpredictable. Natasha got something similar. Comics-Jackie did not, but she's a vampire, so she's got her own rules.
> 
> 3\. Bucky's WWII call sign really was "Bluejay", and Steve's really was "Eagle". The rest just sort of happened.
> 
> 4\. Now would be a good time to point out that I wrote this in the summer of 2014, when AoS was on break, AoU hadn't come out yet, and therefore almost any SHIELD agent (including Clint Barton) could have been Hydra. Feel free to worry about that. On a happier note, there's nothing here about a farm.
> 
> 5\. If anyone is interested, I know exactly what kind of tea Jackie was drinking and can link to it. I drink it regularly, and it's sort of my headcanon Peggy Carter blend. I feel like Jackie and Peggy would have similar taste in tea, even if Jackie was a few rungs up the social ladder from Peggy back in the day (but hey, Peggy ended up as Jackie's boss for a while, so there's that).
> 
> 6\. I am on Tumblr! I am onethingconstant. Follow me for lots of Marvel goodness and about 15% other stuff. Also the opportunity to ruin a fascist's day just by following (I don't know how many times I have to say I'm not kidding about the fascist, but I AM NOT KIDDING ABOUT THE FASCIST).


	7. How to Win Friends and Lie to People

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve and Bucky pick up a couple of dangerous new friends.

**STEVE**

"Raven to Eagle. Come in, Eagle."

I pause as I'm creeping down an upper-level corridor. Bucky sounds out of breath in my ear.

"Eagle here," I say.

"Got a little friendly-fire problem here, Eagle—shit!" There's a crackle, a noise that sounds like a pebble striking a concrete wall, and then the hiss of quick breathing in the comm.

My heart jumps into my throat, but I keep my voice level. _Easy_ , I tell myself. _It's Bucky. He can handle it._ "Raven, say again," I murmur. "What friendly fire?" I'm not on Bucky's level, and Sam should have come down into the base half a mile from either one of us. "Falcon, do you copy?"

"Not me, Eagle," Sam says. "I'm not engaging—guh!" There's a thud.

"Falcon!" I know I'm too far away to help. I curse this bunker for being so large. What's going on? "Raven, do you copy? Whoever's firing, it's not a friendly!"

"Negative, Eagle!" Bucky's line hisses with static, and there's another _spak_ noise, like a caroming pebble. "Are you telling me Robin Hood works for Hydra?"

_Robin Hood?_ At first I think Bucky's trying to say something in code. We both saw that movie when we were young, but I don't see the connection. "Say again, Raven?"

"Graaahhh!" The sound is half-snarl, half-groan. "I am taking _arrow_ fire, Eagle! Real arrows! Tell me there's a goddamn Avengers safeword!" _Spak. Spak._ Now I recognize the sound. Arrowheads hitting the wall. "I don't wanna shoot a friendly here, Eagle, but he's not letting up!"

Oh, God. This is bad. I haven't seen Clint Barton, the SHIELD agent turned Avenger who totes a collapsible bow and goes by Hawkeye, since shortly after the Battle of New York. For all I know, he _is_ Hydra. And Bucky's down there with him, holding back because he thinks Barton is a friend of mine.

And if he's not Hydra, he _is_ a friend. Damn it. And if Barton's down here, it's only going to get worse, because unless he's Hydra, I know who'll be working with him.

_Spak._ Bucky is swearing fluently under his breath.

"Eagle?" It's Jackie. She sounds worried. "How do we proceed?" Meaning: _What the hell do we do now?_

I really miss the war sometimes. At the very least, I miss uniforms. I rifle my mental card index for something Barton would associate with me.

It's a short list, but I've got something. "Eagle to Raven," I call. "Repeat after me." I enunciate the next sentence clearly.

"You are kidding me." Bucky's voice is flat.

"It's your best chance, Raven." 

"Oh, for the love of—" There's a boom as Bucky puts a finger over his mike, but I still hear him yell loud enough to make me wince: "Hey! Hey, Errol Flynn!"

Silence. No more arrows. I wonder if Barton's even heard of Errol Flynn. That's a 1945 reference.

Bucky takes a deep breath and adds the phrase I gave him. His voice booms.

"Ya want some shawarma?" Then, sotto voce to me: "Eagle, you're gonna have to tell me what that stuff is."

"Roger that, Raven." I smile tightly. "What's he doing?"

"He's ..." Bucky's voice shifts as he leans out. "He's walking over. Huh. I thought he'd be taller."

"Okay, Jimmy. Go introduce yourself."

"Roger that, Eagle." He sounds resigned. _Jimmy_ is another code word. We worked it out on the drive to Brooklyn. There are people in the world who might not react so well to being introduced to either Bucky Barnes or the Winter Soldier. Buck's never liked his real first name, and Jimmy is probably his least favorite form of it, but while he was on the run, sorting out his mind, he somehow picked up the name Jimmy Dugan. That's far enough from his real identity that he can use it as a backup to avoid getting shot in the face for things that weren't his fault. As long as he keeps his arm covered and goes by Jimmy, he's relatively safe. He hates it, but he makes it work.

And on an open channel, right now, I don't dare call him Bucky.

"Hello, Nat," I say into my mike.

"Hi, Steve," she answers immediately. "What're you doing down here?"

"Oh, you know. Looking for trouble."

"Good place to look." Her voice rises slightly in pitch. "Hawkeye, what's your bead on Raven?"

I hold my breath. Natalia Alianovna Romanoff—Natasha—is probably the best spy I've ever met. She dropped off the grid after Washington, and I didn't expect to run into her again this soon. She's more than smart enough to see through a transparent lie like "Jimmy Dugan, friend of Captain America." But with Barton relaying the intel, she might just buy it. And I think Bucky can fool Barton.

Once she sees Buck's face, it'll all be over, of course. Nat owes Bucky for his actions as the Winter Soldier; he's shot her twice that I know of. She knows he was tortured and brainwashed, but I still can't tell whether she's holding a grudge. And if she is, Buck's in a world of trouble.

Nat knows I went looking for Bucky. She warned me against it, but she knows I didn't listen. She may or may not know I found him.

"How's Falcon?" I ask Nat, to pass the agonizing wait time.

"He'll be okay in a minute," she says. "I didn't recognize him from behind."

"Eagle, status?" That's Jackie. Still worried.

"Eagle to Nightingale," I say. "We met a couple of friendlies who'll need in on the channel. Call signs Widow and Hawkeye."

Nat and Jackie talk for a minute, getting everyone on the same comm frequency. It doesn't surprise me that Jackie missed Nat's signal. If anyone could hide a transmission from Jackie, it would be Nat.

"Hawkeye, status report on Raven," Nat calls.

There's a short pause, and I wait to see if I'm going to have to fight my fellow Avengers for my best friend.

Then Clint Barton's Iowa twang cuts in on the line. "All clear, Widow. I'd have a beer with him."

Thank God for Bucky's charm. I don't dare sigh with relief on an open channel, so I settle for crossing myself in the darkened, empty corridor of a French Hydra base.

"Are we gonna do this, or just stand around all day jawing?" Bucky asks.

And just like that, we're back on mission. Sam gets his comm earpiece back from Natasha, who actually apologizes for decking him. Nat and Clint won't say what they were doing in the base, but they quickly agree to help us clear it out, including destroying the synthetic man. The plan will work even better with a couple of two-man teams in the mix, and maybe, I think, Bucky will get close enough to Clint that Nat won't need too much payback for their history together.

She's curious, though. Once we start hitting pockets of resistance—roaming pairs of guards, mostly, then full-blown attack squads—she gets more talkative. I don't answer much; I'm busy watching my own six as the only solo flyer left on this op. But I hear Nat trying to get Bucky talking. She's suspicious.

"So Jimmy, you got a last name?" she asks as I hear the zap of her gauntlets.

There's a pop from Bucky's line. He's shot someone. "Dugan," he says, sounding bored. Pop-pop.

"Any relation to Patrick Dugan?" She means the Howler.

Bucky grunts. He's one of the few people I know who can talk and fight simultaneously. "My granddad," he says, and grunts again. Sounds like a kick.

"Cut the chatter," Sam orders. "The non-Avengers here need to concentrate."

There's a click as Nat's line cuts out. Now she'll start interrogating Sam about "Jimmy", I guess. I hope he's a better liar than I am. I make a mental note to buy him a drink later.

Here is what happens when three Avengers, a cyborg super-soldier, and an Air Force pararescue invade a large Hydra base. First, most of the people we meet run away. This is a lab facility, and that means non-fighters: scientists, laboratory technicians, and support staff who see my shield and uniform coming their way and immediately start planning a career change. Sam, Bucky and I all had covert entry points—thank you, Jackie—so from Hydra's perspective, we just appeared in the middle of their base and started stirring up chaos. They might be part of a fascist death cult, but that doesn't mean they actually want to die. I spend the first ten minutes of action smashing every hard drive I can find, just to be a nuisance, and looking for anything that looks like a place to keep a synthetic man.

The second wave is coming, though, and it hits me ten minutes in when I jog around a corner and find half a dozen big men in black jumpsuits holding energy rifles. I get the shield up before the front rank can fire, but the blast hits me like a truck and I'm slammed back into the corridor wall.

"Eagle to all points," I say into my comm as I shake the ringing from my ears. "Now engaging." And I charge.

There are two secrets to making Captain America work as a fighter. The first, of course, is the serum. Make a soldier bigger, faster, stronger, and quicker to react than he has any right to be, and he's going to win a lot of brawls. That's obvious. But there's only one of me—maybe two, depending on how you count Bucky—and that's where the other secret comes in. And the other secret is that I act completely nuts.

Nobody in his right mind charges six energy rifles by himself. It's stupid. I wouldn't do it if I weren't fast enough to cover the space before the shooters can react and carrying an indestructible shield in front of my face. But about half of what I do in a fight—right down to the stars-and-stripes uniform I never wanted in the first place—is crazy, and that's the only reason it works. People see the costume and they hesitate. They see me lead with my head and they think I know something they don't. They see me jump onto a tank by myself and they assume I can rip it apart with my bare hands. Technically I can, but it would take me twenty minutes and I'd probably get shot before I was done. But nobody thinks about that. Instead, they run. Captain America is fifty percent chemistry and physics and fifty percent psychology. Bucky and I used to laugh about that.

I plow through the Hydra squad, slicing through weapons—right through the power packs so the acid works for me—and punching and kicking men. I break a leg with my bootheel and fracture a skull with a backfist. Leg sweep, turn, stomp, shield slice, elbow, shield punch. It's like a dance, and in a few seconds, it's over. I'm not even breathing hard. I tug the straps on my shield to make sure they're secure—every soldier has his little rituals—and set off at a jog again.

"Eagle, status?" Jackie asks in my ear.

"A-OK, Nightingale," I answer. "I think this is a storage level. What've you got with some excitement?"

"Falcon and Widow have the motor pool. Hawk and Raven found the main laboratory."

Nat and Sam don't need my help to wreck escape vehicles. And I want to link up with Bucky as soon as I can, in case his cover gets blown and he needs someone on his side. I don't even need to tell Jackie which one I'll pick. "Point me, Nightingale."

"Stairwell to your right."

I head up and follow her directions, listening in on the radio chatter as I climb. Nat and Sam aren't taking any fire, just creeping around disabling cars. Clint and Bucky are unusually quiet, though they'll double-click their mikes every time Jackie asks for a status check. In between the clicks, I can hear the occasional piccolo-pete shrill of a high-cycle Hydra blaster. They're busy fighting somebody.

Two levels up and past three little bands of roving Hydra goons, I find a larger contingent barricaded in a hallway and firing furiously at a recessed doorway farther down. I see one Hydra agent collapse with an arrow in his eye as I come up behind them, and I smile and grip my shield a little more tightly.

I make a point of shield-punching as many of them as I can. The distinctive _whunk_ as the guns stop firing gets Buck's attention. He leans out of the cover of the doorway, spots me decking the last fighter, and gives me a thumbs-up. With the left hand, I notice—and it's still got a glove on to match his now-scorched leather jacket. His cover is intact. I return the thumbs-up.

Bucky and Clint climb out of their improvised foxhole as I come walking over. Clint dodges past me and starts pulling arrows out of bodies, checking the points for damage. The good ones will go back into his quiver.

"Hiya, Jimmy," I say to Buck as we reach each other. I clap him on the shoulder like I'd do to a much younger soldier. "Making friends?"

Clint still has his back turned, so Bucky quickly flips me off before grinning and saying, "I guess."

"The kid's a natural, Cap," Clint says as he slips a last arrow into place and turns around. "Pretty good aim." He grins. "Sticky fingers, though."

"Bastard," Bucky retorts good-naturedly. "I borrow _one_ arrow—"

"Were you gonna give it back?"

"Not since it exploded, no—"

"See?"

Bucky gives me a mock-pleading face. "He doesn't want to share his toys. Next time, can I get some exploding arrows?"

"You don't have a bow, Jimmy," I say, playing along.

"At these ranges? I'll just throw 'em."

"Maybe for your birthday," I say, and ruffle his hair just to mess with him. He gives me a dirty look, but there's laughter in it. We've spent most of our lives, Zulu time, with him rubbing in the fact that he's a good year older than I am. I don't get to turn those tables very often, and luckily for me he seems determined to be a good sport about it.

I don't have to tell him the stakes. Bucky can't avoid everyone I know for the rest of his life; he's got to meet people sometime, even though many of them will hate him for what was done to him. Most of those people don't worry me too much, but Natasha does. If she decides to get even with Buck, they're both going to get badly hurt or killed. Clint's approval will go a long way toward heading off that particular disaster.

Besides—and I will never tell him I know this about him—Bucky needs people around. Before the war, he was happiest as the center of attention. Now his Christmas-card list is down to me, Jackie, and Sam. He's got to start making new connections before he explodes. And he could do a lot worse than Clint Barton.

"Nightingale said you found the main lab?" I ask. Bucky hooks a thumb at the doorway. There's a little window in the door; I peer through it. Most of the lab has a standard layout—benches, shelving units, computer terminals—but one wall is taken up by a line of what look like glass-fronted cells. There are four of them, each maybe ten feet on a side, metal cubes set into the wall with clear front panels revealing what's within. The long shelf built into each rear wall looks like a bed, and each box has a toilet, so they're pretty clearly meant to contain humans or humanoids, but three of them are empty. The fourth has a figure huddled in a rear corner, away from the light. It's hard to tell with its knees pulled up and its head down, but it looks like an adult man—visible musculature under a red jumpsuit, broad shoulders, cropped hair. The hair is blond, a bit lighter than mine.

"It looks human," I say to Buck. "Are you sure that's the synthetic man?"

"It looked human in the picture, too," he says. "And who else is going to have the air evacuated from his cell?" He points. I squint. Sure enough, I can see the readout panel on the door. The phrase _Warning: Vacuum_ glows red above the keypad.

"So it's synthetic or dead," I agree.

"Not dead," Bucky corrects me. "I banged really hard on the door before you got here, and he lifted his head. Now I think he's just ignoring me. Jerk."

"Well, he _is_ a robot," I point out. I study the door. "So how do we get in there? Does our mutual friend know the keycode?"

"No, they changed the sequence on me," Bucky says. "Gee, I wish somebody had the master key."

I grin tightly. "What a coincidence." I take a half-step back, chamber my arm, and drive my shield into the crack between the door and the frame. One good shove, and the door grinds open with a shower of sparks.

"I never get tired of seeing that," Bucky announces, looking around at the ruined door. "Thanks, punk."

"My pleasure, jerk." 

"You guys are weird," Clint says from immediately behind me. I jump; I keep forgetting how quietly he can move, but he doesn't run around with Natasha for nothing. He pokes his head between Bucky and me and surveys the lab. "So this is it, huh? Did you guys bring charges?"

"No good," I tell him. "The last Prometheus lab we busted up had anti-pyrotics in the air supply. Nothing would burn."

"What'd you do?" 

"Broke stuff," Bucky says shortly. His eyes are fixed on the robot, who still hasn't moved.

"I'm okay with that," Clint says. "Is that the killer robot?"

"Best guess," I say, and heft my shield. I haven't really thought much about how we're going to destroy the creature or whatever it is. Take it apart? Blow it up outside? I wonder if Tony Stark can shoot it into space.

It feels a little weird, thinking about dismembering something with blond hair and opposable thumbs. It really does look human, at least with its face obscured. But I remember Jackie's file. This thing was grown in a laboratory, and if Bucky's memory fragment is accurate, Hydra's been working on it for at least twenty years. All it's ever done is destroy. Its purpose is to burn.

It's better off as ashes.

I glance sideways at Bucky. He's staring, unblinking, at the thing in the cage. I wonder if Hydra ever kept him in one of those cells. He'll never tell me, I guess. I nudge him in the side so he looks at me and I mouth _You okay?_ He nods, but he looks pale. Poor guy. The sooner we destroy this place, the better. 

The original plan called for me and Buck to smash this place up together, but I don't think it's a good time to reveal that left arm of his. I've got the shield. That makes this my job. I step over the threshold and walk toward the cell. 

Then I hear the clink.

I spin around in time to see, through the doorway, a metal sphere the size of a golf ball rolling down the corridor toward the door where Clint and Bucky are still standing.

"Get behind me!" I shout, and I grab Bucky's shoulder with my free arm and yank him into the lab. Clint doesn't need telling; he dives for the cover of my shield. I shove Bucky behind my back and brace myself.

The last thing I see is the flash.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. Errol Flynn was the star of a number of classic swashbuckler movies from the Brooklyn boys' day, most notably _Captain Blood_ and _The Adventures of Robin Hood_.
> 
> 2\. Yes, I know sound doesn't carry in a vacuum. Bucky hit the door hard enough to vibrate the wall the synthetic man is sitting against.
> 
> 3\. I am on Tumblr! I am onethingconstant there. Come follow me for Marvel goodness, fanfic, and the opportunity to ruin a fascist's day just by being there.


	8. Do Your Part

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky does what he has to do to make sure Steve is safe. It's what he's always done. But maybe not for much longer.

**BUCKY**

Nobody remembers getting blown up. We remember the moment before, and sometimes bits of the moment after. But our brains don't hate us enough to make us remember the moment of an explosion.

When I open my eyes, my first thought is: _I can't breathe._ My second is: _Oh, God, not this again._

I'm lying sprawled on the laboratory floor, and I feel like there's an 800-pound gorilla on my chest. What there actually is is a 240-pound super-soldier and his 50-pound vibranium shield. Steve has fallen on top of me, and he's not moving. The first thing I do is check his pulse. It's strong, and I can feel him breathing now, his back expanding rhythmically into my chest. I get my left arm under his body and shove hard, rolling him awkwardly off me. I can feel the servos straining, but I can't hear them. Or anything.

_Concussion grenade_ , I think as I squirm out from under my best friend's unconscious body. _Should've killed you. Shield took the brunt. Shield and Steve. Get up._

The lab is a wreck. There's broken glass and shattered furniture everywhere, but—I make an awkward 360-degree turn as I stand up—the synthetic man's cage is intact and Clint Barton is already starting to stir on the ground. His mouth moves, but I can't hear him.

_Deaf. You're temporarily deaf. Ignore it. Use your eyes, get your ass off the ground, get in the fight, godammit!_

The voice in my head sounds like me, like Bucky's head-voice before I figured out I was talking to myself. At least it's not the machine. But I do feel like I'm pretty well concussed. I'm dizzy. I sway on my feet.

_Ignore it. Come on. Get it together. They're coming for you._

They certainly are, as fast as whoever tossed that grenade can get out of cover. I drop to one knee and pull the shield off Steve's arm. There's no resistance. He's completely out. Bleeding in a few places, too. Bits of metal are sticking out of one leg—looks like pieces of the door. No arterial spray, but he's still bleeding. And he's not waking up.

I have a momentary flashback to the last time this happened. That Hydra train through the Alps, the blast that knocked Steve out. I picked up his shield then, too. And I died. Zola said I didn't, but I know. That much I remember.

_Don't think about it. Steve needs you. Gun. Shield. Move your ass._

But the voice is right. Steve's in no shape for what comes next. It's down to me. I shrug off my jacket and throw it at Barton. In my peripheral vision, I see him catch it and his mouth starts to open as he sees my arm and puts two and two together. 

I shove the shield onto my left arm and draw my gun with my right. I'm still deaf, and so's Barton, probably, so I catch his eye, point the shield at Steve, and then point it at an imaginary point on the other side of a wall—the way we came in. The message is clear: _Get him out of here._

Barton opens his mouth like he's going to object, so I aim the gun at him and glare. He puts his hands up. I holster the gun, stalk over, and grab an explosive arrow out of his quiver. I transfer it to my shield hand, redraw the pistol, and step out into the hallway without a backward glance.

I don't know if I'll see Steve again after this, but if I do, I'm damn well going to be able to look him in the eye.

"Raven to Nightingale, transmitting blind," I say, in case my connection to Jackie is still live. "Eagle is down and needs immediate evac. Eagle and Hawk en route to extraction. Eagle needs medical aid." I take a deep breath and shake my head once more to clear the cobwebs. "Raven now engaging."

I hesitate. The whole op has gone FUBAR, I know. I'll be lucky to live through the next few minutes, and if I do, I'll be looking at a future that will make me wish I had died. I can't even say goodbye to Steve, not if I want him to make it out. 

But there's one thing I can do, if Jackie's still listening.

"Raven to Nightingale," I say, fighting to keep my voice level. "Tell my girl I'm sorry. Make sure she knows." And I heft the shield and start to run.

The last thing I think before the fight starts is that I'm glad I can't hear Jackie right now. She's probably furious.

The Hydra squad is just creeping around the bend when I spot them. I stop in my tracks, quickly take aim, and squeeze off two shots around the shield. The point men fall. I advance again, and their energy weapons open up on me, but I hunker behind Steve's shield as much as I can and it takes the worst of the blasts. It scares them, too; I can see it in their faces as I get closer. They know who owns this thing, and they've heard rumors about me. A bionic arm holding a vibranium shield is two kinds of bad news.

My gun clicks empty. No time to reload. I toss it away behind me, draw my knife, and charge.

It's like fighting with a blanket wrapped around my head. Most of my hearing is still gone, except for a low buzz of tinnitus and occasional distorted low-frequency sounds, so I have to move fast and keep my head on a swivel to make my eyes compensate for my ears. I throw myself into the front of the squad, slashing and kicking and shield-punching with no real goal except to keep moving and keep everyone busy. This is a delaying action and I know it. I might be able to take out a Hydra squad on my own normally, but not without running and stringing them out a little. Now I've got to be a wall, a big, vicious distraction that keeps them from crossing an invisible line and getting too close to Barton and Steve. I get occasional glimpses of my protectees as I'm working: once as I spin to add momentum to a knife thrust, once as a Hydra goon grabs me by the neck and tries to pull me over backward. Idiot. I drive the back of my head into his face, hear the crunch through bone conduction and feel him fall as I get an upside-down look at the space I'm defending.

I see Barton hustling out of the lab with Steve in a rescue carry. My friend's still out cold, ragdoll-limp and draped over Barton's shoulder like a hilariously oversized field pack. Steve's bigger than Barton, and the sight of the stocky archer in black hauling my enormous red-white-and-blue buddy around makes me smirk. Barton happens to glance my way just then, and I wonder what he thinks of all this. There are bodies on the floor, I'm covered in other people's blood, and I'm grinning like a maniac as I turn back around and slam a borrowed shield into a Hydra goon's head.

Twenty minutes ago, Barton was talking about having a beer with me. Times change.

I've got a bottleneck going, a crush of Hydra bodies all trying to get at me at once through the narrow junction. Their friends' corpses are becoming a hazard, too; dead or wounded men are beginning to litter the floor. I can feel the machine trying to take my wheel, and I know that's why I've been cutting throats instead of punching them and aiming for heads instead of kneecaps. I'm a soldier, or I was, but the Winter Soldier is a murderer. Even Steve is willing to kill if it's necessary, but the monster in my head genuinely likes it, as much as he can like anything. I can feel him hammering on my brain, writhing under my skin. He wants out.

I won't let him free, though. Maybe it doesn't matter very much since I'm probably going to die soon anyway, but it matters to me. I knew when I was six years old that I was willing to die for Steve Rogers, but I'll be damned if I die as anybody but Bucky Barnes.

I wait until the hallway behind me is clear and the bottleneck is ready to burst. Then I sheathe my knife, jump back, and toss the arrow to my empty right hand. As soon as my boots hit the floor, I'm turning, doing the math in my head before I release. And I let the shield fly ...

... right into the empty hall I've been defending. It caroms off the walls, bounces off a T-intersection, ricochets around a corner, and buries itself invisibly in a distant wall with a familiar _chank_. I hope Barton can pull it out. I don't want to give the shield to Hydra, but I will if I have to. It's better than giving them Steve. _Anything_ is better than that, including what I'm about to do right now. I raise the arrow.

"Hold it," I snarl, and add a translation in French. I'm holding the arrow just behind the head. The little light on the explosive charge is blinking. It's primed.

"Get me someone in charge," I tell the goons who have stopped midway through climbing over their friends' bodies. "Either I get to negotiate, or I blow us all up. Including Prometheus."

It's a bluff. It's a big, fat, stupid bluff. But the thugs know I can keep killing them, and they might not know I can't burn the lab. They don't want to die, or be blamed for losing their bosses' pet science project. 

I repeat myself in French, adding a couple of expletives. I've got a hazy memory now of learning the language—really learning it, working and practicing, not getting it programmed in like Russian. There was a Frenchman in the Howlers with me, a little explosives expert named Dernier, who'd gotten run out of Marseilles by the Germans. His English was crap, and Gabe Jones, our radio operator and resident polyglot, had to do a lot of translating. I used to practice English conversation with Dernier when Gabe was busy or I was bored, and Steve and I both learned French that way. Steve wanted to talk to Resistance members. I wanted to pick up French girls.

And I think Jackie was part of it, too. She'd grown up speaking French and spending her summers in France, and I wanted to impress her. She's probably got a few old letters somewhere with my godawful schoolboy French in them. I think I even used some in the proposal.

It's a dumb thing to remember at a time like this, but it makes me feel human. I cling to that feeling.

A timer ticks away in my head while the cannon fodder get on the horn to their superiors. How long will it take Barton to get Steve to the extraction? How much time do I have to buy? The Winter Soldier holding up a pointy grenade in the most sensitive area of a Hydra base is going to attract attention, but nothing will stop people from noticing two Avengers hauling ass out of the complex. Barton will run into at least some resistance. Am I looking at ten minutes? Twenty? The game changes if they get caught.

I wish my hearing would come back. The buzzing isn't quite as loud anymore, and I can hear more low-frequency noises—boots on the floor, a deep-voiced Hydra agent barking into a comm—but Jackie's voice in my ear, if she's talking, is out of my range. I wish I could hear her. Something is crackling on that side. Is she trying to give me orders? Chew me out? Tell me help is on the way? I have no means of telling.

"Raven to Nightingale, transmitting blind," I say, in case she can hear me. "So far, so good."

Then the crowd parts, and three men with high rank insignia step out. I nod politely to them, although I'd really prefer to flip them off.

"Winter Soldier," says the guy in front. I don't know if I'm just trying to sort all Hydra command the same way, but this one looks like Sydney Greenstreet, the actor who played the Fat Man in _The Maltese Falcon_. He's big and jowly with a thinning white fringe and I really expect to see Peter Lorre twitching behind him. His French accent is bizarre in context. He's got the science and political heads on his collar, like Rathbone back in Zagreb. I guess he's in charge. I have to read his lips to understand him.

"Whom do you serve?" Greenstreet asks me, in French.

I feel like being a jerk, so I answer in English. "I have no idea what you're talking about," I say. "I'm offering you a deal, plain and simple."

"A deal?" More French. "What do you propose?"

"I want back in," I say. The words nauseate me, but I keep my face straight. "You take me back, I don't blow you up." I thumb the timer on. I can't hear the beep, but I can see in Greenstreet's face that he does. The blinking light on the explosive arrowhead blinks faster.

"Ten seconds," I say.

"Deal." This time it's in English.

I thumb off the timer.

"You understand, of course," Greenstreet says carefully, "what your bargain entails?" He gestures at the bodies on the floor. "You have hardly engendered trust today." 

I swallow. Two heads? He's got to know. "So make me trustworthy," I reply. "This is a fully equipped complex, isn't it?" I twitch my head back toward the main lab. "Equipped for him. That means you're equipped for me."

I can see the surprise working its way across Greenstreet's face. Yeah, he definitely knows. And he never thought he'd see someone volunteer to be put into the machine.

The crackle in my ear is getting louder.

"You are a complicated man, Winter Soldier," says Greenstreet.

"Not so much," I answer. "You'll want to pull your men off the other intruders, by the way. They're all running for it, and they have nothing of value to you. I doubt they're worth your men's lives."

"Oh!" Greenstreet smiles. "So this is an exchange. Your freedom for your Captain's." He shows his teeth.

I shake my head. "It's not that hard, Fat Man. I owed him a favor, and now we're square. Now I'm getting what _I_ want." I lock eyes with him. "I want to do my part again."

Greenstreet is considering. "I don't know," he murmurs. "I don't know whether to believe you or kill you."

"Ask me if I care," I retort. "I'm just sick of being here. Shoot me or fix me, I'm happy either way."

I can see him pondering, feel him thinking about it. He's right about one thing—he holds all the cards except one. He can have me shot right now. He can put me in the machine. All I can do is blow myself to bits. 

I'm really, really tempted. Just being down in this tunnel is making my skin crawl. I can't believe I spent decades in places like this, under the control of people like him. At least Steve got a vacation, of sorts. Nobody used him while he was gone. I can't believe I'm signing up for this again.

No—on second thought, I can. I've done a lot of crazy shit in my unnaturally long life, and the craziest usually came down to Steve. If anything could get me to rejoin Hydra, it would be saving him. 

Honestly, though, I'm hoping they just shoot me. The way Greenstreet is looking at me is making me sick. It's taking everything I've got not to hit this detonator.

"Very well," he says finally. He touches a comm earpiece. "Hydra prime to all units. Break off contact with the intruders. Let them run, as long as it's away." He lowers his hand and smiles. "Will that do?"

"Dandy," I say. 

"Then surrender your weapons."

I drop the arrow and toss my knife away. I don't need to be told what comes next. I put my hands on my head and assume the position. Two underlings come forward and start patting me down. They're thorough about it, too. They find the other knife at the small of my back and the little holdout in my right boot, plus a couple of leftover explosive pellets in my pockets. They check everywhere they can without stripping me right there, even running fingers through my hair and probing inside my mouth. I resist the temptation to crack dirty jokes. Nobody who _wants_ to join Hydra would find my situation funny.

At last they admit defeat. I'm not carrying anything more interesting than a Swiss Army knife I pickpocketed from Sam Wilson. They take my earpiece, of course. I'm sorry to see that go. I miss Jackie's voice already.

"Take him to the lab," Greenstreet orders. "Put him in a holding cell." He smiles apologetically. "It will take us a few hours to prepare to—what was your phrase?—fix you."

I shrug. "Whatever." My two new pals take me by the arms—the guy on my left hesitates before grabbing the metal—and march me into the still-wrecked laboratory. The synthetic man is still in there, huddled in his own cell, but he raises his head as I'm hustled in.

I'm surprised at how human his face looks. He's got a long, flaring nose and sharp cheekbones that make him look alert and interested in everything, plus wide blue eyes that remind me of my sisters when they were little. Innocent, blank-slate eyes in a very individual face. I wonder if Horton sculpted him to look like someone, or if the cells just made him grow like that. He blinks curiously as my escorts key in a code and shove me into the glass-fronted cell next to his. I'm expecting the push, so I don't stumble. The door hisses shut behind me.

I look around at my new home and wonder how long I'm going to be there. A few hours, Greenstreet says, before they'll be ready to program me. A few hours. That's how long my friends have to figure out my incredibly obvious code phrase, and see through my lies.

Might as well try to sleep. I lie down on the metal shelf, put my head on my left arm, and hunch up enough that my face should be hidden from the surveillance cameras that have to be around somewhere.

I know this was the only way. I know Hydra would never have let a wounded Captain America escape unless I offered them a much bigger, easier prize. I ran the variables before we came in here, and re-ran them when Barton and Romanoff showed up. Once Steve was down, my only option was to trade my life for his, one way or another. Anything else would have just gotten us all killed, or worse—the thought of Steve in the chair makes me want to claw my own face off. No. No, I did the right thing. 

But the right thing is rarely the easy thing.

I could've just hit the detonator instead of dropping the arrow. I wanted to. I'd rather be dead than here in another metal box. But I remember Steve's face when I woke up in Jackie's spare room.

_What are we gonna do, Buck?_

And Jackie saw it, too. _He's afraid of losing you._

I'm not used to being wanted, or needed. I'm rusty at thinking about what my absence would do to the people around me, and most of the time I don't care anyway. They're just people, and I haven't been a people person since Krausberg. But Steve is the exception. I do crazy shit for him.

So I haven't killed myself, and I'm waiting for the cavalry to arrive. And I'm hiding my face so Hydra won't see that I am terrified out of my mind. It doesn't matter anyway. Steve'll come.

He always comes.

But four hours later, the door hisses open, and it's time to go. I stand up without being asked, walk with my escorts without being touched. It's a small room at the end of a dingy corridor. The chair is an older model, dusty in some spots and smelling of industrial cleaner in others. I sit down, let them strap me in—two cuffs on the right arm, one EM cuff to disable the left. A tech slips the mouthguard between my teeth. I bite down and tilt my head back into the headrest. The chair hums into motion. Electricity buzzes.

I smell ozone, and my breathing speeds up. I begin to shake all over. My body remembers what my brain has erased. I know this will hurt.

But I think: _Steve will come. He always comes._

It's the last thing I think before the clamps close around my head, and the pain hits me and I scream.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *hides*
> 
> 1\. I swear I'm not deliberately populating this story with classic movie actors. It's just how Bucky thinks.
> 
> 2\. Steve's POV is next. He will not be happy. Sorry this chapter is shorter than the others; the next one will be, too. I had to split things up because key events keep happening while one Brooklyn boy or the other is absent or unconscious.
> 
> 3\. I am on Tumblr! I am onethingconstant there, too. Come be my friend and ruin a fascist's day.


	9. Amateurs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve wakes up to passive-aggressive surgery and bad news.

**STEVE**

The first thing I think as I'm waking up is: _Ow._

My head hurts. Actually, everything hurts on a low level, like I've been hit everywhere at once with a baseball bat. But my head is throbbing with every beat of my pulse, and there's a stabbing pain in my left leg for some reason.

No. Actual stabbing.

"Yeow!" I open my eyes and try to sit up. A hand on my chest pushes me back down.

"Hold still," Sam says. "She's almost done." He leans over me.

"She who what?" I mumble. I'm completely lost.

"Stop squirming, Steve," Natasha Romanoff says from somewhere outside my field of vision. "I gave you anesthetic. Don't be a baby."

"Ow!" I try to keep from moving, but it feels like someone's poking a rusty screwdriver around inside my leg.

"Of course, you might have metabolized it," Nat adds.

I grit my teeth. I'm lying on my back, staring up at a grimy vaulted ceiling. It looks oddly familiar, but I can't place it.

"What happened?" I grunt to Sam.

"Concussion grenade," he says. "You got the worst of it. There's a little bit of shrapnel in your leg. Widow's got to dig it out before you heal up with it still inside you."

"Got it. Ow." I clench a fist. "How's everyone else?"

"Nat and I got out fine. Barton hauled your star-spangled butt out. He got your shield too."

"Thanks." Now I'm clenching both fists. "Bucky?"

Sam doesn't say anything.

"Okay, that's it," Nat announces. "Closing up." I feel the needle slide into my skin.

But right now, I don't care. I'm staring up at Sam, who's avoiding my eyes.

"Sam," I say. "Where's Bucky?"

"Barnes won't be joining us." It's a new voice, one I haven't heard in a while. I turn my head to the side and see a grim-faced fiftyish black man walking out of the darkness. He's wearing sunglasses even in the gloom, but I don't need to see the scarring around his left eye to recognize him. His leather jacket flaps as he walks. Nick Fury, former head of SHIELD.

I instantly stop caring about the pain. If Fury's here, something big is going on. And if Bucky's missing ...

"Tell me everything," I say, sitting up carefully so I don't disturb Natasha at her work. I am not going to take Fury's bullshit lying down, literally or metaphorically.

Fury is one of the few people I've gotten to know well since I came out of the ice, which is a pretty sad commentary on how I've adjusted to the change. Fury is a consummate spy, a smooth and natural liar, and the undisputed king of dirty tricks and black ops now that he's put a bullet in Alexander Pierce. Just about the only humanizing details I know about him are that he's got a sarcastic sense of humor and that his grandfather used to be an elevator operator. And he was probably lying about his grandfather. He lies about a lot of things.

"Your coordinator recorded all your transmissions," Fury says. "After the grenade went off, Barnes reported you injured, got Barton to evac you, and picked a fight with a Hydra kill squad to cover your retreat. He either got separated early or didn't try to keep up. Once you were clear, he surrendered ... and told the base commander he wanted to rejoin Hydra. He sounded sincere. His offer was accepted. That's the last we heard."

"He what?" I sit bolt upright. Sam grabs my shoulder to stop me from moving. Natasha mutters something in Russian, probably unprintable. "That's impossible, Nick. Bucky would never rejoin Hydra. He's been fighting them ever since he escaped."

"And that's what, a week?" Fury folds his arms. "Week and a half, maybe? He's had half a century to change, Cap. You don't know him as well as you think."

"And _you_ don't know him at all," Sam interrupts. "I heard the same things you did, Fury, and I'm telling you he was faking. He knew Hydra would kill him if he didn't surrender, so he played for time. He's a prisoner, not a volunteer."

Fury looks at the ceiling. I get the feeling he's rolling his eyes. "Doesn't matter now anyway," he says. "It's been six hours since they took him. Two hours ago, sensors picked up a big electrical surge consistent with the use of their cognitive-programming rig. Somebody got his brain rewritten right after Barnes surrendered." Fury glares around the room. "Are we taking bets on who?"

I feel like I'm going to be sick.

"Coulda been Prometheus," Sam insists."We know Hydra's been planning to program that thing."

"No." Natasha finishes taping gauze over the ad hoc surgery site and tosses me a roll of bandages so I can wrap it up. She meets my eyes as she talks to Sam. "I don't want to burst the bubble here, but the timing's way too convenient. I've seen those machines before—they take a long time to program and calibrate. If Hydra fired one up a couple of hours after a major attack, it was a rush job and they must have used a saved program. That means it was someone who'd been rewritten before, and it was an emergency. Someone couldn't be trusted without a little conditioning." She shakes her head. "I'm sorry, Steve."

I unroll the bandage so I have something to do. I want to start smashing furniture, but I have to be better than that. The image of Bucky back with Hydra spins through my head. _Why would he do that? What are they doing to him now?_

I'm definitely going to be sick, but later. Not in front of Fury. I'm still not sure what I think of him. He told me once that he didn't know about what Hydra did to Bucky, but I've never completely believed him. He was always big on compartmentalizing information, and I can't quite shake the nagging thought that he might have kept the secret from me so I would be a more effective SHIELD agent. I read Buck's SSR file not long after I thawed. He was listed as MIA, not dead. Did Fury suspect even then?

"I want to hear the tapes," I say. "I've gotta hear him."

"Later," Fury says. "Prometheus is launching in three days, according to the chatter. Another frontal assault won't work, so we need a way to stop him once he comes out of his rabbit hole."

"Is that why you're here?" I ask him. "For Prometheus?"

"That's right," Fury replies. "And we were ahead of the game before you boys came crashing in. Now Hydra stands a good chance of burning Paris to the ground if we don't work together." He gives me a wary one-eyed look over the top of his sunglass frames. "Are we gonna be able to do that, Captain?"

I glare at him. "You've always gotta be in charge, huh, Fury? No matter the consequences."

"No. _Because_ of the consequences."

"For God's sake, Nicholas, grow up!" A light snaps on in another part of the cavernous space, and Jackie stalks toward us, carrying a laptop. She looks me up and down as she approaches, and then turns her attention to Fury, who earns a glare that reminds me of my fourth-grade teacher when someone didn't have their homework. "You're not the head of SHIELD anymore, Nicholas," she tells him, her accent crisp as autumn frost. "You're not the head of anything. If Captain Rogers chooses to work with you, it's because he thinks it's a good idea. Trying to bully him won't do you any good. You remember how he reacts to bullies."

"Lady Jacqueline," Fury rumbles. "I could've sworn you had orders to stay under house arrest."

"Yes," she says blandly. "Stroke of luck for me you can't give me orders anymore, isn't it?" She gives him a tooth-rottingly sweet smile. "Lucky for you, too. You seem to have a shortage of adult supervision."

"This is a highly sensitive operation—"

"Being run by an amateur," she cuts him off. "Literally. And as we're all amateurs now, I suggest you defer to amateurs with greater expertise. In all matters pertaining to Horton cells, that would be me. In all matters pertaining to the motives and loyalties of James Buchanan Barnes, that would be Steve Rogers." She glances at Natasha. "Agent Romanoff, a word in your ear?"

The two women leave together. I gaze around at the newly revealed space, which is all vaults and pillars, dust and damp. I finally recognize it. 

"The Paris catacombs," I remark. "Haven't been down here since the war. Is this your new base, Nick?"

"Temporarily," he grunts. 

"Not for very long," Sam adds. He comes up behind me as I finish wrapping my leg, tie off the tape, and ease myself off the table Nat was using as an operating surface. "I'd say this stuff's been here less than a week."

"We like to stay mobile," Fury admits, glowering.

"And you've got Widow and Hawkeye working for you," I note. "I thought Nat was taking some time off."

"Hydra caught up with her and Barton in Sarajevo," Fury says. "They came and found me. Listen, Cap—"

I put up a hand as I straighten up. "Just don't," I tell him. "Tell me what you want, tell me what you're offering, and let's keep this strictly business."

He scowls, but he knows he's over a barrel, I can tell. It's funny; a month ago, I would've followed his orders without question. SHIELD was my connection to the world, the only thing that made me feel like I had purpose. I had to serve if I wanted to do anything. Now it's Fury coming to me for help.

_Looks like you're giving the orders now, Captain,_ he told me recently, before the assault on the helicarriers. He was almost mocking then. Now he's entirely serious.

"We need intel," he says.

"You mean _you_ need intel," I correct him. "About what?"

Fury glances from me to Sam. "Prometheus," he says. "Horton cells. With Barton and Romanoff, my best bet was to shut down the project before Hydra could launch it. Now they'll be on guard, and we probably won't get another chance until they set that thing loose. But with you two in the mix, we might still be able to take it down before too many people get hurt. We've got three days to make a weapon that counteracts Horton cells. You gentlemen have fought a human torch before—"

"That's not the same thing," Sam interrupts. His face darkens. "Whatever you think happened in Zagreb, I was there. And you don't have the right to compare Barnes to that thing Hydra's building."

I'm surprised, and not just because Sam's never gotten in Fury's face before. I wasn't sure Sam liked Bucky all that much. Certainly not enough to come to his defense. But maybe I don't give him enough credit. The first thing I noticed about Sam, back when I was lapping him on the footpaths around the National Mall, was that he committed to things. If he set out to do something, he'd come through or work himself to collapse in the attempt. He nearly burst a lung trying to keep up with me running laps. It makes sense he'd be just as determined about making a friend of Bucky Barnes, whether Bucky was present or not. God knows why he'd set himself that kind of goal, but it's the kind of thing he'd do. And he wouldn't let Nick Fury malign a friend of his.

Fury is staring at Sam in total incomprehension—what Bucky used to call "a face like a dog said 'sit'". After a couple of seconds, he says, "My apologies."

Sam nods grimly.

"Point is," Fury goes on, "you two have had contact with Horton cells under combat conditions. So—what works?" He looks at me.

"Hydra put some kind of anti-pyrotics in the lab air," I say grudgingly. "If we can get Prometheus in a confined space, we might be able to flood it and put the fire out. After that, Prometheus is just another soldier, right?"

"And in the open?" Fury asks.

"The fire's tough to extinguish," Sam says. "It's sticky like napalm. You've got to smother it completely." He shifts his weight, and I can tell he's remembering the burns on his legs. Buck apologized before we left England, but I don't think Sam's fully healed yet. Regular soldiers take more time.

Time ...

"Cold," I say. "We can make it cold."

Fury arches an eyebrow. "Explain."

"After he got soaked in the Horton solution, Bucky was put into a cryo pod," I say. "He was in there long enough to lose consciousness, and when he got out, his temperature was still really low. He made it all the way out to the surface before the solution caught fire. Horton cells shut down in the cold."

"Yeah, I remember that," Sam chimes in. "He was still freezing when you got him on the plane. We had to use you as a heater."

"How cold?" Fury asks. "Did you get a temperature reading?"

I snort. "I don't carry a thermometer around with me, Nick. And I was a little busy that day. I remember his lips were blue, and he had ice chips in his hair, I think."

Fury grunts. "Guess that'll do for a start. I'll see if I can find out how low those cryo pods get set. Maybe we can freeze Prometheus." 

"Sounds good," I reply. "Now what's in it for us?"

"You're not serious."

"The hell I'm not," I reply. "Nick, you know I'm going to help with this because I don't want to see Paris burn. But I'm not your janitor anymore, and you're not a general. If you want my team on your side, you've got to make it worth everybody's while."

Fury folds his arms. "What do you suggest?"

I jerk my head at Sam. "First, I know you've still got some pull with the U.S. government. There's an open slot at the VA that Sam ought to be filling, helping soldiers. Once he decides he's had enough of a vacation, he's gonna have that job waiting for him."

"Fine. Is that it?"

"No." I feel Sam shifting beside me, but I keep going. "Second, when this is over, I get a secure phone number or an email address—a way to get in touch. You're gonna owe me one for this, and I plan to collect."

Fury eyes me levelly. "I don't give out a lot of markers, but I guess you've earned one. But why do I get the feeling you've saved the big demand for last?"

"Because I have. When this is over, I get an extraction team for Bucky. Full complement, full battle rattle. We're taking him back from Hydra, and when we're done, we're taking him to a secure medical facility that can undo whatever's been done to him."

"Do you think I've got a helicarrier in my back pocket?" Fury demands. "You broke all my toys, Cap."

"We know," Sam says. "I helped."

"And so did Bucky," I add. It's kind of a stretch, but he did shoot up the targeting bay. And Fury doesn't know exactly who did what up there.

Fury glares.

"That's my price, Nick," I say. "Take it or leave it."

"Yeah? What's in it for me? I've _got_ your intel."

"But you don't have me," I say. "This isn't gonna be the last time you come to me, and we both know it. You've burned a lot of bridges, and your assets right now are down to the people in these catacombs. How fast do you think they'll disappear if I stop taking your phone calls? Captain America, who never lies and is always on the right side?" I show him my teeth. "You worked hard at building me up, Fury. And that gave me the power to tear you down."

Fury eyeballs me, long and slow. "You've changed."

"Not so much," I say. "I've just got something to fight for now."

"Freedom wasn't enough?"

"Nobody fights for freedom," I tell him. "Soldiers don't fight for ideals. Not even me. I'm just a kid from Brooklyn, pal. And I fight for the soldiers next to me."

I feel Sam stand up a little straighter, and I want to look over to see if he's staring Fury down, but I don't dare take my eyes off Fury's face. I'm having a contest of wills with one of the most strong-willed men on the planet. I can't blink.

"Barnes made his choice," Fury says at last. "I'm not gonna risk the lives of my people to rescue a man who, as far as I know, doesn't even want to be saved." His voice is a soft snarl.

I draw in breath to argue back, but I don't have to.

"It's a good thing he does, then," Jackie says as she and Natasha walk back over to us. Jackie's got her laptop open, balanced deftly in the crook of her arm. She sets it on the operating table. "Everyone listen to this," she orders. "These are James' transmissions after you were unconscious, Steve. Either his hearing or his receiver had been damaged, as he apparently couldn't hear my replies, so I've left them out. Listen carefully." She taps a key.

Bucky's voice buzzes out of the laptop speakers. "Raven to Nightingale, transmitting blind," he says. His words are a bit slurred, as if he's been hit in the head. _The grenade,_ I think. _He was right behind me, wasn't he? I probably fell on top of him. He's concussed._

Bucky goes on talking, calling groggily for an evac. I actually hear him shake his head. The mike crackles, and I imagine him doing the doglike shiver he used to shrug off the effects of haymakers in the ring. He's getting ready for a fight.

"Raven now engaging," he says, and his breath catches. I hear the hesitation before he calls again. "Raven to Nightingale ... tell my girl I'm sorry. Make sure she knows."

Jackie taps the key again, and the recording stops.

"So what?" Fury asks. "He apologized to his girl. So?"

Jackie looks at me. I frown.

"Bucky doesn't have a girlfriend," I say slowly. "He was engaged to Jackie before he went missing, but it wasn't serious." I catch Fury eyeing me. "Long story. Point is, there's no girl for Jackie to say sorry to. She's as close as it gets, and he didn't say _you._ He said _she_."  
"He made up a girlfriend," Nat agrees. "The question is why. I went over the tapes, Nick. There's nothing to indicate he was lying to Hydra except that. It's got to be code."

"The oldest and strongest code," Jackie agrees. She looks around our little group, focusing on each of us in turn. "Before we left England, James and I ... caught up, I suppose. Exchanged biographies. I told him that if I had known he was the Winter Soldier all those years—if I had known he was a captive—I would have rescued him. He said he was glad I _didn't_ know because he believes the Winter Soldier would have killed me in the attempt."

"He's right," Fury says.

Nat elbows him. "Shut up."

Jackie touches a few keys. In Bucky's voice, the laptop says, "Make sure she knows."

"It's not an apology," I say slowly. "He's asking to be rescued. It's a call for help."

"Best he could do under pressure." Jackie nods.

"Son of a gun." Suddenly I'm grinning so hard my face hurts. "He's conning Hydra. Bucky's conning Hydra."

"And Hydra turned him back into the Winter Soldier," Fury reminds me. "We're back to square one."

"Doesn't matter." I feel like I've dropped a hundred pounds of gear I forgot I was carrying. "Leave no man behind. We're gonna stop Prometheus _and_ save Bucky."

"That's a tall order, Steve," Nat warns. 

"I've gotta ask," Sam puts in, looking at her, "has saying that _ever_ stopped him from doing _anything_?"

The argument rises around me. I stare at the laptop, unable to stop smiling. I feel eyes on me, look up, and see Jackie watching. She's smirking like a fox. We don't have to say anything. 

_Hold on, Buck_ , I think. _We're coming._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come be my friend on Tumblr? I am onethingconstant there. Follow me for 90% Marvel goodness and 100% opportunity to ruin a fascist's day.


	10. Shave and a Haircut

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky makes a new friend, teaches a few lessons in elocution and murder, goes on the world's most unpleasant sightseeing expedition, uses the phrase "Giants suck" in a tactical context, messes with Steve's phone in the name of the greater good, and goes dancing with a pretty girl.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay, lovelies. I sent a novel manuscript out to my beta readers in preparation for (I hope) final submission, and that always makes me want to hide under the furniture. I hope Bucky teaching someone to pronounce "fuck" correctly makes up for some of that.

**BUCKY**

I wake up numb.

The machine is a literal and metaphorical shock to my system. I don't remember very clearly, but I think I almost always lose consciousness when I'm being programmed. Super-soldier hibernation? I don't know. I just know there's pain, I black out, and then I wake up as whoever they want me to be. That's almost always someone who feels less pain than Bucky Barnes, and very little emotion. The Winter Soldier can get pissed off if someone works at it, and he was scared of Steve, but that's about the extent of his emotional range. Anger, fear, and a sickening emptiness. That's it.

So when I wake up back in my cell, remember I'm trapped, and feel that void in my gut in place of rage or panic or anything else, a little voice in the back of my head begins to scream. I'm back in the nightmare. Steve didn't come after all, and now the whole horror show is about to start all over again. I'm a passenger in my own body, and I can't even be upset about it.

I lie still for a couple of minutes, pretending to sleep and trying to figure a way out of this. The first duty of a prisoner is to escape; that's what they taught us in basic. I've beaten the machine before. I can do it again.

Can't I?

After a while, my head clears a little more, and I start to take in my surroundings. The lighting in the cell is dim; I roll my head sideways and see that the lab is dark and empty. Maybe it's night. That would be nice.

Then I hear the thump. I freeze in place because it sounds like it's coming from everywhere around me. _Thump_. The bed-shelf under me vibrates. _Thump_. My head starts throbbing in time to the rhythm. _Thump_. The wall against my right shoulder trembles. _Thump._

I sit up. The thumping continues, but it's not so loud or painful anymore, now that my skull isn't resting on metal. _Thump_. Now the sound has a direction. _Thump_. I turn my head, gingerly, to look.

Whatever is thumping, it's coming from the wall connecting my cell to the neighboring one. Judging by my view of the lab, I'm in the same cell I was in before I was programmed, which means that's—

_Thump._

Aw, hell. The robot's thumping the wall. It's probably what woke me up. Just what I need—a noisy neighbor.

_Thump._

My head aches in sympathy. I'm feeling less pain than I ordinarily would, but I still don't like it. I stand up, stalk over to the wall, haul back—

_WHAM._

My metal palm slams into the common wall. It doesn't break anything—doesn't even dent it—but it sends a shiver through both cells. The robot's in a vacuum over there, so he can't hear the impact, but he'll sure as hell feel it. The message is unambiguous: _Knock it off._

There's a pause. A skipped beat. Then: _Thump._

Terrific. The robot is either an idiot or a wiseass.

_Thump. Thump. Thump_. Like a metronome. I wonder what he's doing over there; then I realize I don't care. I'm exhausted, beat-up, mindwiped, and incapable of feelings other than rage. Morning is coming, and I need all the rest I can get. If I have a fuse, it was short and it just burned up.

I snarl and punch the wall with my left fist. Then, before another _thump_ can happen, I punch again, rapid-fire, over and over. _BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM._

Silence again, and it goes on long enough that I think I might have gotten through to him. Stupid robot. But then:

_Tap._

It sounds like knuckles rapping. And before I can react, it adds: 

_Tap-tappa-tap-tap._

I stare at the wall, not sure what I just heard. But just in case, I extend my metal index finger and rap twice: _Tap-tap._

Immediately, I hear: _Tap-tappa-tap-tap._

_Tap-tap_ , I reply.

_Tap-tappa-tap-tap._

I feel my shoulders shaking before I realize I've started to laugh silently. For a moment, I'm laughing too hard to tap back.

_Tap-tappa-TAP-TAP_. It's louder, more insistent. _Shave and a haircut._

Still laughing, I knock back: _Two bits._

I'm in a darkened Hydra base, I thought I woke up brainwashed, and I'm knocking shave-and-a-haircut on my cell wall with my neighbor, the killer robot. Can there be a funnier joke?

But I'm laughing with relief, too. The more I wake up, the less numb I feel. I'm annoyed at the robot, I'm cracking up at the absurdity of my situation, and every bruise and cut on me is starting to hurt. The machine didn't work. I'm still me. I've never been so happy to be in pain.

That doesn't matter to the robot, obviously. He keeps tapping shave-and-a-haircut like it's the most important thing in the world. We take turns being two bits. It's a little weird, like listening to a baby babble. There's obviously an intelligence there, but I have no idea what it's trying to communicate. Shave and a haircut. Shave and a haircut.

After a while, I wonder if I can get him to talk. I learned tap code while I was locked up in Krausberg—Monty Falsworth taught a lot of people. I don't know if the robot can even spell, but it's got to be worth a try. I tap twice, pause, then tap three times. That's H. Then I tap two-four. That's I. HI.

There's a long silence. I tap again: two-three, two-four. HI. More silence.

Then a burst of taps. Two-three, one-five, three-one, three-one, three-four. It's been a while, and it takes me a minute to pull the whole tap code out of my war memories and decode the message. H ... E ... L ...

_Hello._

Son of a bitch. This might actually work.

My neighbor is tapping again. N ... A ... _Name._

His name? My name? I wait, but there's no follow-up. He must've asked my name. I think about that. Is Hydra listening? Should I answer as Winter Soldier?

Oh, the hell with it. The Winter Soldier doesn't know shave-and-a-haircut, so if Hydra's listening my cover is already blown. But I don't feel right about giving my real name to a robot, so I tap _James._

The response: _Hail Hydra James._

I scowl. I am not playing this game. Not in tap code in the middle of the night. Not while I'm locked in a box waiting to be used as a weapon. I tap back, sharply: _Fucc Hydra._ There's no K in tap code; C does the job.

A thoughtful pause. Then: _What is fucc._

I rub my face with my flesh hand. I can't believe this. How does somebody learn shave-and-a-haircut and not what _fuck_ means?

I tap: _Fucc bad. Hydra bad._

The reply is quick and loud: _Fucc Hydra._

Well, at least we agree on something.

We keep tapping, both of us speeding up as we get used to the code. The robot seems awfully curious about me. He asks me what I am ( _soldier_ ) and why I'm here ( _captured_ ). He asks what happened to my arm ( _hurt_ ) and how my hair got burned ( _accident_ ). Questions and answers use as few words as possible; tapping is time-intensive. I ask him some questions, but his answers are vague. What is he doing here? ( _Waiting_.) What is his name? ( _No_.) 

Finally, I tap: _Quiet please. Need sleep. Good night._ Technically "good night" is GN, but the robot isn't big on acronyms. I step away from the wall.

But I hear the taps: _Stay._

Rolling my eyes, I tap again: _Tired now._

_Lonely_ is the reply.

The word goes through my heart like a sword. I remember what that's like. Down in the dark, sometimes sleeping but mostly just trying not to see or hear what the rest of me was doing out in the world, I was all by myself. I told myself I wanted that, because it was that or go crazy, but the truth was that I missed people. I missed conversations. I missed music. I missed my friends. Whenever I was awake inside the Winter Soldier, I was alone. And it very nearly drove me insane.

_This is Hydra's weapon_ , I think. _A lonely, half-crazy robot who knocks shave-and-a-haircut to get attention. And God help me, I feel sorry for him. Because that's what I was, too._

So I step back to the wall, lean against it, and tap: _Tomorrow._

There's a long pause. Then: _Tomorrow._

I drag myself back to the bed and lie down. I feel like I've been run over; my muscles ache, my burns itch, and my head might as well be in pieces. I'm a mess. And in a few hours I've got to get up and pretend to be the Winter Soldier. The first duty of a prisoner is escape, and that means not letting Hydra put a bullet in my brain.

Brain. That reminds me of something as I'm drifting off. Tony Stark said something about my brain. Something about burning. The memory port, that was it. A little device Hydra implanted in my brain so I could be programmed. Stark burned it out of me. Maybe that's why the machine didn't work right. That's a nice thought. I'm too broken even for Hydra. I close my eyes.

_Thump. Thump._

It's softer now, not as frequent. I can sleep through it, I think. I'm tired enough. I wonder what the robot's doing, though. 

And maybe it's because I'm half-asleep, almost dreaming, but the question riffles my mental card file. A quick succession of images and sounds flies through my head, from the Winter Soldier years. They're all body parts hitting walls—feet and elbows and backs and knees. I've thrown, shoved, and slammed a lot of people around. Without meaning to, I cross-index and come up with an answer.

_Thump_. It's the sound of a head hitting a wall. The robot is slowly beating his own head in, like a zoo animal in a cage that's too small. I slide into sleep, vaguely aware that the thumping is still going on, and I dream about a mangy old lion Steve and I saw in the Bronx Zoo when we were kids. It used to pretend to sleep when we walked by, but one eye was always open and the end of its tail would twitch. In my dream, the tail is metal now. _Thump. Thump._

I wake up a few hours later, after the lights are on. I sit up, push my hair out of my eyes—a few burned bits break off in my hand—and start my performance. All those years as the Winter Soldier have given me a good poker face, at least. I avoid looking around as I get up and use the cell's toilet. The guy I'm supposed to be doesn't care if he's being watched. He's always being watched.

There are Hydra agents milling around the lab, but they give me time to finish getting ready. When I'm done, I take a second to listen to the tiny buzzing voice of the machine, and I do what it says just as if it were the only voice in my head. In this case, it's standing by the cell door in at-ease position.

Greenstreet emerges from the busyness of the lab and approaches my cell. He touches an intercom switch.

"Winter Soldier," he says in French. "Whom do you serve?"

I answer, as prompted, in Russian: "I serve the Red Hydra." And in the glorious privacy of my mind, Bucky's voice— _my_ voice, still—adds: _You sap._

Greenstreet touches a button, and the cell door slides open. "Excellent," he says. "Now come. It's time to do your part."

I follow him out of the lab and out through the base, walking at heel like a well-trained dog. It's a strange feeling, following orders while keeping my own hands on my wheel. I walk with my head pointed at my destination, but I'm scanning everything in my peripheral vision, looking for weak points in security or possible avenues of escape. I'm getting out of here the first chance I get.

But what about the synthetic man? I can't leave him in Hydra's hands, and I can't take him with me—he'll burn the city down as soon as he gets outside. Steve's right; I'll have to kill him somehow, destroy him completely. Poor bastard.

Greenstreet leads me down a couple of levels to a playroom. That's Hydra slang for it, of course. Playrooms are kind of like big, evil gymnasiums—large open spaces with heavily reinforced walls, ceilings and floors, big empty boxes that can be used for everything from testing death rays to hosting soccer tournaments. I saw a herd of cows penned up in one once. Actual cows. I still don't know why. I try not to think about it.

This playroom is empty except for a small group of scientists and guards standing around two mats. One of those mats is a giant padded exercise mat like I've used in Hydra combat training. The other is smaller, maybe four feet on a side, and it's a dark gray color that reminds me of asbestos linings. That's probably because the green exercise mat has six Hydra commandos standing on it and the gray mat has one humanoid figure standing in it, on fire. The synthetic man turns his head to watch me as I enter. I can feel his eyes on me, but I can't see them through his crackling flames. His facial features are just a few dark hollows and bright ridges on a head enveloped in fire.

Greenstreet leads me to the edge of the green mat. "Winter Soldier," he announces, resting a hand on my flesh shoulder, "I want a demonstration of your skills. These men will kill you if you allow them. Do not allow them. Simulate killing blows where appropriate—they are expensive."

He gives me a gentle push, and I step onto the mat. I'm already sizing up my opponents, trying to figure out what's going on. What am I really doing? Getting a post-programming checkup? Testing some commando squad's field readiness? Standing in for a more powerful opponent—maybe Steve?

Then I notice the fighters' faces. Every Hydra agent who sees me for the first time reacts with a mix of fear, horror, and fascination. I'm a boogeyman. But these guys aren't reacting. Their faces are completely relaxed, identically blank—

_Oh, crap_ , I think, and they all move at the same time.

_Expensive_ , Greenstreet says. Not _valuable_. People are valuable and equipment is expensive. These men are equipment. As they spread out to encircle me, I see patches of short hair where their heads were recently shaved. I see scars on faces and limbs, too—burns, shrapnel stippling. I know what they are. They're MODOCs.

MODOCs are like the Hydra retirement plan. They're foot soldiers who died, or almost died, in service to Hydra. They've had body parts replaced and brains rewired to make them easily programmable cannon fodder—meat machines, basically. I never got the MODOC treatment; it was developed after I came along as a way to mass-produce the Winter Soldier procedure. The surgeries are irreversible and the shelf life of a MODOC is relatively short, but they're a cheap and easy alternative to me. By weapon standards, the Winter Soldier is a Ferrari and MODOCs are Volkswagens. But sometimes a VW is all you need to get you where you're going.

Oh, and unlike me, MODOCs have no fear of death. This is going to hurt.

They attack in concert. One takes a swing at my head, one charges like he's going to tackle me, and one moves up behind me to either kick out my legs or trap me in a bear hug. Hit 'em high, hit 'em low, hit 'em dirty. But as quick as MODOC reflexes are, they didn't get Zola's super-soldier serum. I twist inside Hit-Em-High's guard, grab his punching arm, and wrench him over to swing him into the football star. Football's momentum sends them both plowing into Bearhug, and they all go down. I slip out of the crash zone and take the fight to the other three.

It's not the easiest brawl I've been in. Watching Steve in the war, I learned how to fight multiple opponents, but MODOCs are tougher than standard Hydra goons. If you want to beat them, you have to cripple or kill. So as I wade in, I let myself off the chain a little bit. I crush a kneecap with a kick. I snap an arm and fracture a leg. I crack two skulls together. Greenstreet said to simulate killing blows. Don't break the toys. Like hell.

A minute in, I feel the chain slipping. I'm getting that little smirk I had on my face when I shot Steve on the helicarrier. I catch myself rabbit-punching Football at the base of his skull. He collapses, twitching, and I step over him to drive my left fist into Bearhug's throat. The hammering in my head is back, and the screaming fills my ears and I don't know when it started but now it's everywhere—

And then I catch sight of the robot.

He hasn't moved. He's just standing there, watching me, his face hidden by a veil of fire, but just for an instant I see his real features in there. Wide, innocent eyes taking in everything I'm doing. I'm a hairsbreadth from snapping, and there he is. Watching.

It stops me. I pull back like I've put my toe over the edge of a cliff, and I do what Steve used to call the dog-shake—a little shiver and head-flick I used in the ring when I'd been hit too hard and needed to get my head straightened out again. Just like always, it resets me to a calmer, more focused place. I look around. All my opponents are down, but Football is convulsing from the rabbit punch. I crouch down, take his head gently between my hands, and twist until there's a snap. He goes limp, and I set his corpse down instead of dropping it. I don't know who he was, but he was human once.

The synthetic man watches it all.

"Thank you, Winter Soldier," Greenstreet says. He sounds annoyed. _Good_ , I think. He adds: "Please step back."

I walk off the mat, turn in place, and stand at ease, watching him. A couple of guards haul off the MODOCs. Football is carried out a different door. Even Hydra can't fix a broken neck. 

Six more MODOCs file in past the injured, cross the floor and stand on the mat. I keep my puzzlement off my face. What, am I supposed to do this all again?

"Prometheus," Greenstreet says. "Show what you have learned."

The synthetic man steps from his gray mat to my green one and walks to the middle. Plastic begins to scorch.

"Begin," says Greenstreet, and the MODOCs all move at once.

I watch impassively, but inside my head I'm gaping. The robot twists inside a guard, grabs an arm, swings ... he repeats the entire fight, move for move. Kneecap. Arm. Leg. Skulls.

Rabbit punch. Throat strike. I feel sick. I'm watching myself turn into the thing I hate. Is this how it was for Steve?

Then Prometheus's eyes meet mine, just like before. He stands up straight and gives a full-body shiver—so that's what the dog-shake looks like from the outside—

And his flame goes out.

There's a _fwoomp_ noise, like someone turned off the gas, and then it's just a tall blond man in a red jumpsuit standing there with steam rising from his head and shoulders. He crouches down and takes a head in his hands.

"Stop!" calls Greenstreet. 

The synthetic man freezes in place, and every guy in a lab coat starts to move. They take readings. They ask questions. They make the synthetic man repeat the motions of the fight. They make him dog-shake, and he explodes in flames. Another shake, and he's out. Greenstreet keeps looking at me. I look back like he's no more interesting than televised golf.

Finally, Greenstreet says, "Enough. On with the lesson."

More MODOCs come out, and I'm steered onto the mat again. Greenstreet says the word, and the fight is on. This time I'm careful. I use minimal force, and I make a point of breaking limbs instead of necks. For once I want to kill—the Winter Soldier part of me because it's fun, the Bucky part because I'd be doing the meat machines a favor—but I don't. I know what's going on now.

I remember the synthetic man knocking shave-and-a-haircut over and over. I remember _Fucc Hydra_. And now the robot suddenly has my moves? Greenstreet called this a lesson, and I'm not the student. Hydra is teaching the robot to mimic me, right down to using the dog-shake to control the seemingly uncontrollable. I'm teaching him to fight.

But I won't teach him to kill. Never again.

Greenstreet works me for most of the day. I fight single opponents, pairs, and groups. I fight men and women, knives and sticks and guns and assorted other weapons. I'm never armed. Striking and grappling. Nerve touches and evasion. It feels like I run through everything I know about unarmed combat. Boxing. Systema. Sambo. Krav maga and capoeira. Even the judo they taught us in basic. And after every round, I'm pulled off the mat, the synthetic man steps in, and I watch it all happen again.

It's exhausting. Nobody can actually fight in close hand-to-hand combat all day, not without taking serious physical damage. Greenstreet keeps me supplied with water—even super-soldiers can get dehydrated—and there are field rations that look like protein bars and taste like cardboard and leather. It's the first time I can remember getting fed as the Winter Soldier, and if this is what I was eating I can see why I forgot about it, but I wolf the bars down because I'm ravenous. God knows what Hydra puts in them, but they keep me going. I fight again, and again, and again.

I'm tempted, many times, to lose myself in what I'm doing. I like fighting, albeit not quite this much; it's one of the things Winter Soldier and I agree on. I don't have to worry about hurting people when I'm fighting MODOCs. It's kind of nice to switch off the noise in my head and let my instincts and reflexes do the work for me. I can feel how easy it would be to just stop thinking altogether, to slide into that space where it's just me and the job in front of me. Follow orders. Serve.

But I feel those blue eyes on me, and I keep clawing myself out of that pit. I'll fight, but I won't serve. And I won't teach this thing to serve, either.

By midafternoon I'm flagging, super-soldier or no. A few lucky shots and a lot of exhaustion are slowing me down. Not the robot—he never eats, drinks, or tires, as far as I can see. I remember what Jackie said about Horton cells. They convert oxygen into energy, and any of them can do any job in the body. Repair muscles and bones, oxygenate blood, whatever. I start getting jealous.

Around four o'clock, by my reckoning, Greenstreet calls a halt, just as I'm thinking of throwing my next fight out of sheer desperation. The robot and I are both marched back to the cells and locked in. I go straight to the bed, crawl onto it, curl up and pass out.

The dream-lion is back, watching me with one eye and lashing his metal tail against the hard ground. This time Steve and I stop to look. It's the old days; I'm about twelve.

"He's big," Steve says wonderingly.

"Nah," I say. "The cage is too small. Makes him look bigger."

"How d'you know?" 

"You ever see a wild lion that lives in a territory the size of a postage stamp?" I roll my eyes. "Besides, look at 'im. Whaddya see?"

"About a million things. You want I should talk about the color, or—?"

"Smartass." I put my hand on Steve's head—already I'm half a head taller than he is—and point him. "The tail."

"It's moving. So what?"

I smirk. "Detention."

With my hand on his scalp, I can feel him raise his eyebrows. "Oh. Mr. D'Armata told you to stop tapping your foot, and you said—"

"I couldn't," I finish for him. "That is a stir-crazy lion."

Steve squints, trying to understand. He's never been stir-crazy in his life, except maybe in a doctor's office. "I dunno, Buck. He just looks hungry to me."

I laugh. "That's 'cause you're hungry, punk! C'mon, I'll get us some peanuts." I muss his hair and turn away.

"We don't have any money," Steve reminds me.

"So?" I flash a grin over my shoulder. Steve scowls. Behind him, I can see the lion watching us, one-eyed. Only now it's not the lion anymore. It's as big as the lion, but the fur is longer and softer and particolored. It's a big calico cat with a tail like a squirrel's, and it's lashing that tail just the way the lion was. And it's staring at me.

_Thump. Thump._

I open my eyes. It's dark again. Feels like I slept for a while; I don't ache nearly as much anymore. The synthetic man is thumping his head against the wall again. _Thump._

"Cut it out," I groan, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes and cursing myself for an idiot. There's no air over there; he can't hear me.

"You're awake?"

I blink and drop my hand. The voice is coming from the robot's cell. It's a bright tenor, speaking English with an American accent. I sit up and stare at the wall. "Who said that?"

"Hello, James." The voice is cheerful. "Fook Hydra."

"Holy shit," I mutter. "You can _talk_?" It's gotta be the synthetic man. Who else would be able to spell _fuck_ but not pronounce it?

"Of course I can. Only when they give me air, though."

"So ... you're on fire right now?" I can't hear flames crackling.

"No. You showed me how to control it. That was very clever of you. How did you figure it out? Do you burn, too?"

"Uh." I think about the dog-shake, about stuffing the Winter Soldier back into the box. I guess it _is_ a little like putting out a fire, now that I look at it that way. "I suppose I do, sort of." I cough. In for a penny, in for a pound. "By the way, it's not _fook_ , it's _fuck_. That's how you say that."

"Thank you. Fuck." It's the most polite I've ever heard the word said.

"No problem." I push my fingers through my hair. Steve's going to laugh himself sick if he ever hears about this. Not that he has to, since I'm going to have to kill this guy soon.

Or am I? I couldn't take him with me before, not when he was a fire hazard. But now ... maybe. I do like him, sort of, as much as I like anybody. He's funny. I don't want to kill him.

"James," says the synthetic man. "Why did you break that man today? The first one?"

I have to translate _break_ in my head, and then the memory floods back—the twist, the snap. I don't know if anybody upstairs is keeping score on me anymore, but I'll have to answer for that one someday if they are. Not just that one, either. I shiver. 

"He was already dead," I say, as much to myself as to my neighbor. "All I did was stop his pain."

"He would not recover?"

"From brain damage and a broken neck? No." The next sentence slips out before I can think. "I know dying when I see it."

"How?"

I lean back against the bedside wall, pull my knees up and hug them to my chest. It feels good to stretch out my back, and it feels safer to be in a ball when I talk about this. "It used to be my job," I say, and I go into what I'm already thinking of as the nickel tour. I can hit all the main points like I'm summarizing a movie. Fall. Ice. Zola. Machine. Pain. Death. Pierce. More pain. More death. Steve.

"He was like you," the tenor voice says. "The dead man."

"Kind of, yeah." I rest my head on my knees. "Except there was no way to save him. Hydra broke him, and then I just hurt him real bad on top of it. The only thing I could do was end it."

"He would not heal?"

"What're you, stupid?" I snap. "No! Humans don't work like you! We get tired, we get broken, and sometimes we don't get fixed. And then we die." I shrug. "Most of the time."

There's a long silence, so long I wonder if I've bored him or pissed him off. Then he says: "My father died."

His voice is small, like a little kid's. Like Steve's, the first time he told me how his dad bought it. Sometimes I think the first death you see shapes all the others.

"He was brilliant," the robot says, "and kind. They made him bury me, but he believed in me. He made a device in my casket that let him speak to me, under the earth. He told me stories, taught me about the world. Then he stopped talking, and I was lonely. I wanted to see his world. I wanted to be good, like he said I could be." His voice gets even smaller. "I'm not good, am I?"

I've never been much for philosophy. Mostly I just listened while Steve talked. But I can't get that dream out of my head. Tony Stark's robot cat is back in Brooklyn, as far as I know, guarding Steve's new apartment. I kept her to remind myself that I _can_ be human, no matter what lies the machine tries to tell me. Patches acts like a cat because I treated her like one. I act a lot more human because Steve assumes I am. So what happens if I pretend I'm talking to a person right now? If the synthetic man can learn all my moves just by watching me fight—even the dog-shake—can he learn to be something besides a Hydra weapon?

Of course, I'm not a great role model for that. I've got to find somebody better than me for him to become.

"Steve would say," I say slowly, "it's not what they make you into that's good or bad. It's who you choose to be. That serum I told you about, it made him bigger, but he was the one who took up saving people and fighting Hydra. The Red Skull got the same stuff and all he did with it was get better at murder. His choice. That's what made him a bad guy; he decided to do bad stuff. Steve always tries to do the right thing, and he's turned out pretty good." I tilt my head back and let it thud gently against the wall. "You learn pretty quick. How hard can it be?"

"In here?" The question hangs in the air.

I grimace. Yeah, it's hard to find good people—or the opportunity to be one—inside Hydra. But it opens a door for me, at least. I want to save this guy's life, if he'll let me.

"How about out in the world?" I ask.

"I don't understand."

"I mean getting out of here. Just leaving. Unless you want to spend your whole life as a Hydra weapon." I shiver. "I don't recommend that."

"Leave? How?"

"They're obviously ramping up for something big, soon. They've got to let you out of that box to use you, right? So just leave. Walk away. Burn anyone who tries to stop you."

"I can't burn people!" He sounds horrified.

"Burn a couple of Hydra agents," I say flatly, "or let 'em use you to burn a lot more innocent people. Which is worse?"

I hear a long, hissing sigh. "What about you?"

"What _about_ me?" I retort, though I'm thinking it too.

"If I leave, they might hurt you. They did it before. I heard you screaming. I felt it."

I chew the inside of my mouth nervously. I've been thinking the same thing. My new friend can burn his way free at almost any time, but I need a mission and limited supervision to pull that trick. What are the odds Greenstreet will trust me that much, this soon? Considering that he's keeping me in a holding cell even after I've been programmed? And what if I'm put back into cryo before I can escape? It messed me up before; it might wipe my broken memory now. Plus once I'm frozen, I'm easy to ship anywhere in the world. Steve might never find me. I'd be lost again, maybe forever.

That's not the kind of hurt the robot meant, but it's the kind that actually scares me.

"If that happens," I say, "go find Steve. Just look around for a guy called Captain America; he'll be easy to find. Tell him Bucky sent you, and he'll take care of everything."

"Who's Bucky?"

_You left out "the hell"_ , I think, but I say: "I am. It's what my friends call me. My legal name is James, but everybody calls me Bucky." I think of Jackie and add: "Well, almost everybody."

"So you aren't really James." He sounds hurt.

"Most people have more than one name," I tell him.

"Oh." There's a thoughtful pause. Then: "I don't have a name. Can I be James?"

I blink at the wall. "I thought your name was Prometheus."

"Is your name Winter Soldier?"

He's got a point. I grimace. "Okay, yeah. But not James, that's too weird. How about I call you Jim? It's another word for James, but I don't use it. That way you can be different."

"Jim." He tastes the name. "Jim, Jim, Jim. Jimmmm."

I laugh. "Is that a yes? Are you Jim now?"

"Yes. I like Jim. I am Jim."

"Nice to meet you, Jim." I stretch out on the bed and fold my arms behind my head. "Now, how are we going to get you out of here?"

We talk for an hour after that, making plans. I sleep some more before the lab techs wake me up and it's time to fight again. Today it's weapons training, since Jim can now control his flame enough to actually hold some. He is, as always, a quick study, especially with my weapons of choice—tactical knife, .45 pistol, and sniper rifle, though he's not really patient enough to be a good sniper. I wonder if he does best with my favorite weapons _because_ they're my favorites, because we're somehow alike. It's a disquieting idea.

The training wears me down to nothing again. It's like they're trying to wipe my mind with exhaustion instead of torture, and it works pretty well. This time I'm asleep on my feet when I'm walked back to my cell. I barely hear the door close, hardly feel myself collapsing onto the bed. There are no dreams tonight. Even Jim is silent.

Well, he's silent until about three a.m. by my internal clock. Then I wake to the sound of his screams.

I jerk back to consciousness in full panic mode. The sound isn't coming from next door—it's coming from deep inside the base. And it's not a full-throated, open-mouthed scream; it's the overheating-engine noise of a man screaming through clenched teeth and a mouthguard. It goes on for a minute, then two, as long as his breath holds out, and then there's a heartbeat pause and the howling begins again. Minutes drag by. The scream changes pitch, rising and falling from a furious growl to an agonized keen. Sometimes he just whimpers. That's the worst.

I never realized the machine took so long. Hearing it happen to someone else makes it worse somehow. I try to keep still, pretend I'm still unconscious, but my whole body shakes in sympathy with Jim.

It feels like hours before I hear them drag him back in. Then they come for me. I sit up slowly, like I'm groggy, and run the options through my head. But there are no options. I can't fight my way out—there's too many Hydra agents between me and my freedom. I don't dare reveal myself by talking; if they think there's a flaw in their programming, they might give up running current through my brain and go directly to a bullet. What can I do? Pretend I'm sick? Hydra doesn't care. Demand to speak to Greenstreet? That'll give up the game. Play dead? In a pig's eye. My only options are death and the machine.

I try to think of Steve as they walk me to the chamber. If I let Hydra kill me, it'll kill him too. He attempted suicide twice before I came back; the third run could be the charm. I've survived before. I just have to survive one more time. The machine means a mission. A mission means a way out. 

I hold on to that as they strap me in and the machine starts to hum. I wait until I smell ozone, and then, just before the pain starts, I imagine myself diving. Down, down, down into the safe and waiting dark.

I've never tried hiding from the machine before, or I don't remember if I have. It doesn't work all the way. The pain's still there, the hammering on my consciousness, the flood of images and sounds and sensations stirred up by over-stimulated synapses firing at random. Sensory overload still happens, and I can't escape the chaos inside my head. 

I scream and convulse as I feel myself being burned away.

But. I snatch at memories as they fly past, on their way out of my brain, and I pull them down with me under the dark water at the back of my mind. I'm nine years old, crawling into bed with Steve on a cold winter night so the frost on the windowpane won't get into his weak lungs. I'm eleven, belting Freddy Reilly for touching my littlest sister. Fourteen and I'm stealing pencils. Sixteen and I'm in the ring. Nineteen and I'm washing dishes so Steve can take an art-school final during his shift. Years fly by, faces and fragments of my life, and I grab as many as I can. _This is who I am_ , I shout at myself, over the screams. _Remember this._ I see classrooms and streets and gyms and battlefields. I chase the people I remember. I fight. And I dive deep and hold my breath for as long as I can stand, just hanging there in the dark.

The last thing I remember is the dark swallowing me whole.

*

I open my eyes hours later, and for once I'm not in the cell. I'm in some kind of recovery room, lying on a gurney. Jim's sitting in a chair next to me when I open my eyes, and he immediately turns to study my face. His expression is perfectly blank, machine-empty. My heart sinks, which is my first real indication that I'm still Bucky and not the Winter Soldier. I think I was hoping the machine wouldn't work on him somehow, that he'd be too unlike me for it to break him. I didn't want to lose him like this.

Then I see Jim's fingertips drumming on the arm of the chair. _Shave and a haircut._ Over and over. _Shave and a haircut._

I don't dare sigh with relief, or smile, so I tap back on the gurney's side rail. _Two bits._

I have the mission in my head, and I guess Jim does too. Once I'm up and moving, Greenstreet sends us out. The job is a simple one. Jim's supposed to make his way to the Arc de Triomphe and release the biggest fireball he can. I'm supposed to make sure nobody stops him. Greenstreet doesn't tell us why we're doing it—we're machines, we don't need to know _why_ —but I can guess. A reusable suicide bomber is a valuable resource. You can hold cities for ransom as long as everyone remembers the first time he went off.

There's no way Hydra's sending two brainwashed operatives out unsupervised, but even I can't spot our tail as I guide Jim out of the base and we board the Metro, exactly as programmed. Which means I can't lose our tail. Damn it.

But we're all right for the moment. Just a couple of guys on the subway, as long as Jim's in street clothes, my sleeves are down, and I'm wearing gloves. I keep one eye on Jim and one on the crowd. Once, when the lurching car throws us together, I mutter to him: "You okay?"

He nods twitchily. "It hurt," he says in a soft voice. "Still does."

"I know," I tell him, swallowing. He's right; I ache for days after I've been put in the machine. I'm so used to it that I forget about it. It's background noise to me. Him, not so much. "But you're gonna be fine," I add. "Just stay close until Steve makes his move. He's around somewhere."

"Are you sure?"

"Very sure," I reply. "He must've been watching the exits. Somebody saw us leave. He's on his way. You can trust him."

"Because he's like you?"

"He's better than me."

We ride the rest of the way in silence, getting off at Charles de Gaulle-Étoile. It's weird to see a metro station named after a guy I met once. Weirder that nothing ever got named after Steve. Bruce Banner was right—history forgets us grunts.

As we walk up the stairs of the station and head for the arch, I start to get nervous. _Come on, Steve, don't make a liar out of me now._ We can't just run for it; our escort will be armed, and while Jim can probably melt bullets and my tac suit is armored, my head is a big, fat target. We need someone to cover us, and that means somebody has to make contact. So while Jim is staring around at the crowd and the traffic and the soaring triumphal arch, I'm scanning faces for anyone I know and especially for a blond American who's a head taller than the average tourist. 

Which is how I almost miss the tall, slim, white-haired woman who steps out of the crowd and stands, perfectly still, right in my path. When I do spot Jackie, though, the tension floods out of me and I feel like my legs are suddenly made of rubber. _I'm home_ , I think. _We made it._ I smile at her and start to say her name ...

And then something hits me from the left side with the force of a speeding truck.

I hit the ground so hard I see constellations. My head whacks the pavement, and a crackle from my bionic arm is my only warning before it seizes up and an electric shock runs through my entire body. Next thing I know, I'm shoved over onto my back, still twitching, there's a weight on my gut and a large hand presses down on my throat, fingers on my carotid arteries. It's over before I hear Jim yell in fright, followed by the _fwoomp_ of him catching fire. I open my eyes.

Steve is sitting on my stomach, knees pinning my arms down, one hand on my throat. He's in civilian clothes except for the shield, which he's drawn back like he's going to punch me. And he's got a look on his face like he's having to kill his dog.

"Hiya, punk," I croak. Best I can do with him choking me. "Y'know, we need a password for this stuff. How 'bout 'Giants suck'?"

Steve's face changes instantly. "Bucky?" He asks. "Is it really you in there?"

"Think so," I gag. He lets go of my neck. Much better. "You wanna let me up now?" I see him hesitate, and add: "Before Hydra catches up?"

He climbs off me, and I sit up as he stands. My left arm hangs limp, dead weight. I poke at it. "What'd you do?" I ask.

"One of Nat's stingers," Steve explains, and pulls a little silver disk off my metal bicep. I feel my arm jolt back to life. I flex it experimentally.

"Ow," I groan. Everything still hurts. "I see where you got the name."

"Whine, whine." He's grinning like an idiot. One-handed, he pulls me to my feet. "How'd you keep from ... you know?"

"Long story," I reply. "Think I—hey, no!" I bolt into the crowd, leaving Steve standing there. Not that there's much of a crowd left. A lot of people ran when Steve tackled me and Jim caught fire. Now the crowd's thin enough that I can see Steve's stocky archer friend raising his bow and taking aim at—

I look up. The burning figure of a man hangs in the sky, about fifty feet up. I blink. I didn't know Jim could do that. Neither did he, maybe. Has Hydra ever let him go outside?

"Barton," I say slowly, "put it away. Now. Please."

"It'll work," he says, his eye still on his target. "It's a freeze arrow."

"In that case," I say, "put it away or I'll shoot you." I glance at him, then look back up at the human torch overhead. "And he'll fireball you. Let him be your friend instead."

"Friend?" Barton scowls. "The killer robot? Are you high?"

"He's not a robot," I say. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Jackie walking toward us. She looks worried. "And he doesn't want to kill anybody," I add. "He's just scared. He's a kid, Barton."

"A kid?" Barton actually looks away from Jim to stare at me. 

"Pretty much, yeah," I say. I wave upward. "C'mon down, Jim. It's okay. These guys are my friends."

Jim hesitates, bobbing like a balloon. Then he starts to descend, in fits, his flame sputtering as he drops a few feet, stops, then drops again. Barton lowers his bow. I start breathing again as Jackie reaches my side and Steve starts jogging over.

"I must say, I never thought of befriending it," Jackie murmurs. 

"Him," I say. "Not it. Remind me to tell you about my cat sometime." I wave Jim lower and lower. It's like coaxing an animal.

When Jim stops suddenly, I think he's just being skittish. Then he whirls in place and throws a fireball into the crowd. At almost the same moment, I hear the familiar _pop_ of a nine-millimeter.

"Gun!" Jim shouts, hurling fire as I shove Jackie to the ground. I crouch over her as I draw my own pistol. Two men dressed like tourists emerge out of the crowd. One points his gun directly at me. The other is already flailing as his black Eiffel-tower sweatshirt is on fire. Steve charges in from the side before I can shoot, and he slams his shield into two heads. Both men collapse. So much for Hydra escorts. I relax slightly.

Then I hear a gurgle. I look down, and the earth drops out from under me.

There's a hole in Jackie's chest, bloody and bubbling, and seventy years of Winter Soldier memories scream at me that it's an exit wound and it's passed through a lung. Jackie's eyes are wide with shock, and her fingernails are digging into my right hand, the hand I used to push her down. She's clinging like she expects me to hold her to life. Her lips move silently.

"Medic!" I scream. "We need an ambulance, now!"

I hear running feet and voices, but I can't tear my eyes off Jackie and everything else is a blur. There's a thump on the pavement beside me, and a wave of warm air tells me Jim has landed, finally, but I'm too busy shinning out of my jacket and trying to press it over the wound to notice. Jackie's grip on my hand is like steel. She's terrified. _I'm_ terrified.

"Stay with me," I plead. "It's gonna be okay. Stay with me."

A warm hand comes down on my flesh shoulder, but I ignore it until I feel another slip across the small of my back. The touch is pickpocket-light, and by the time I look up, Jim is bending over Jackie with one of my knives in his hand. 

Before I can say anything, he slices his free palm with my blade, and I just barely see the blood—red like mine, kind of a surprise—beginning to well from the cut before he slips his wounded hand under my jacket and presses down on Jackie's chest.

"What're you doing?" I ask. I feel Jackie's body stiffen.

Jim's blue eyes are wide and frightened, but he sets his jaw and presses harder. He doesn't look at me, but he says two words.

"Being good."

*

"Horton cells," Steve says, and takes a sip of his beer. "Hell of a thing. He said he got the idea from you?" Two days and he's still asking, like he thinks the answer's going to change.

"Yeah," I say. I'm ignoring my own drink to watch the dance floor. There is exactly one swing club in this part of Paris, and it took every connection we had to get us in here. The place is in a tiny basement, and half the space in front of the band is taken up by two dancers. The woman looks maybe twenty-four, and she's tall, blonde, and a fantastic dancer. The man is also tall and blond and also looks a little younger than I do, but he's tripping over his own feet and laughing a lot.

"How?" Steve asks. 

"I told him humans aren't like him, that we die if we don't get fixed."

"So he decided to fix a gunshot wound with his own artificial cells? That's insane. What made him think it would work?"

"He doesn't like death, Steve. Nobody does." I grab Steve's phone off the table and start playing with it. His password is "password", the dumb punk. As I tap commands, I keep an eye on the dancers, especially the girl.

I forgot how beautiful Jackie was at this age. But Horton cells didn't just repair the tissue damaged by the gunshot. Maybe it was the Infinity formula, or maybe it was all Jim; I don't care. Her hair is golden, her skin is smooth—she looks like the girl who showed me the lavender. I can't stop staring. She really loves to dance, too.

"You gonna gaze at her all night, jerk?" Steve asks. "'Cause your new friend is a terrible dancer, and one of us had better cut in." 

"Punk." I tap the phone and pass it over. "Here. Call for you."

"What?" Steve flinches back from the phone like it's hot. It buzzes as the line starts to ring. I stand up as a voice answers and Steve picks up the device. "Sharon?" he says. "Uh, hi ..."

I smirk as I walk onto the dance floor and cut in on Jim, who steps back politely as always. One song ends, and another, slower one begins as Jackie and I fall into step.

"Finally," she says, arching an eyebrow. "A girl could die waiting."

"Well, you did marry somebody else," I say. "Broke my heart."

"People like us don't have hearts, do we?" She smiles.

"Yeah, we do." I close my eyes and breathe in her smell. She rests her head lightly against the side of my neck. I haven't slow-danced since the war. I never liked it until now.

"I loved you, you know," she murmurs in my ear. "Did you know that?"

"No," I say. "I was an idiot. But I loved you. Did _you_ know?"

"Of course." I feel the chuckle ripple through her. "Is it always this strange for you? Being out of time like this?"

"It is." With half an ear, I listen to Steve trying to talk to that nurse over the music. It makes me smile. "But I'm starting to like it. You?"

"I'll manage." She touches my face, slips her fingers into my hair to tilt my head down. I let her.

This time the kiss is not on the forehead. We're both a little out of practice. Neither one of us cares.

The band plays on. Across the club, I hear Steve laugh at something Sharon says on the phone. Barton and Romanoff are probably still talking at their corner table, Sam's watching the band, and Jim's wandered off again. But for one perfect moment, I don't care about any of that. I'm not thinking about Hydra, or the machine, or the seven decades I missed, or even the nightmares. I'll always be a long way from home, but just for right now, I'm a little less broken than usual. And I like it.

I lost one family and gained another. I made it all the way to the future, almost in one piece. I'm dancing again, and kissing a woman who turns out to be pretty good at kissing, good enough that I'm remembering more about the art myself. And she's laughing. Tonight is the night I discover that laughter has a taste.

"What's so funny?" I murmur as we stop for breath. 

"You," she whispers back. "Me. All of us. It's faintly ridiculous."

"I like ridiculous."

"You would."

I'm not sure who kisses first this time. It doesn't matter.

But I think:

_Maybe the future's really not that bad._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More random notes:
> 
> 1\. Tap code is best known as a cultural touchstone of Vietnam War POWs, but they got the idea from WWII POWs, especially the Brits, so thank you, Monty. And yes, "fuck" in tap code really is "fucc". Fook Hydra!
> 
> 2\. Honestly, there is no explanation for how the original Human Torch can turn off his flame in the comics. He just figures it out one day. This explanation is as good as any.
> 
> 3\. Once again, I am indebted to Mike Carey's "The Torch" for Jim's sponge-like learning ability. Carey speculated that Jim got a lot of his personality, including his empathy and love for his teammates, from Toro, the similarly fire-powered teenage boy he kinda sorta illegally adopted in the way of Golden Age heroes everywhere. Fun fact: Toro was only a little younger than Bucky, and the two of them became best pals during the war—so much so that when Bucky got his hands on the Cosmic Cube (in Avengers/Invaders—that's the Tesseract, MCU fans), he passed up a chance to undo the whole Winter Soldier thing and instead wished to raise Toro from the dead. So it seemed appropriate for Bucky to step into Toro's role here and give Jim the stubborn, caring personality he needed.
> 
> 4\. Once more so we can hear it in the back: Bucky/Jackie is NOT a canon ship in movies or comics. This is one of those cases where the story gets away from me.
> 
> 5\. This is, however, approximately how Jackie got her Spitfire powers in the comics. I wish I could make this shit up. But no. She got attacked by a Nazi vampire named Baron Blood(!) and Jim gave her an emergency transfusion.
> 
> 6\. There is a third volume in this series, called "The Nature of Monsters", but I don't plan to start posting it until after I wrap up "The Cat-King's Guest" and, ideally, finish "Agent Carter and the Left-Hand Man". But hey, Patches is really prominent in that one.
> 
> 7\. I am on Tumblr! I am onethingconstant. Come follow me for Marvel shenanigans and the chance to ruin a fascist's day.


End file.
